A playful puppy of a memoir about a big dog career.
A veteran sportscaster revisits his career.
Michaels (b. 1944) begins with—and alludes to in other places—his good fortune in his life and career. He writes about his boyhood in Brooklyn (yes, he loved Ebbets Field), the family’s move to Southern California and his great admiration for the Dodgers’ announcer Vin Scully. Throughout, the author mentions “the Rascal” that’s in him, a Puckish sort of personality that occasionally escapes its minimum-security facility for some prankish fun. Michaels’ father had one sort of connection to the celebrity world, and the author got an early audition (at 19) with sportscaster Curt Gowdy, who was encouraging and gave him some important advice: “Don’t ever get jaded.” After an early break that nearly broke him (working with uncooperative Chick Hearn), Michaels—who’d early on resolved to be an announcer—began his rise through the ranks, including a big break, announcing games for the Cincinnati Reds during some of their Big Red Machine years. He proved himself there, and before long, he was in the booth for some of the most memorable contests of our era. He writes in detail about the 1980 Olympic hockey game between the United States and the Soviets (and how he ad-libbed his classic line, “Do you believe in miracles?”). He also writes frankly about his friendship with OJ and Nicole Brown Simpson. He was slow to accept OJ’s guilt and visited him several times in prison. The author does not really eviscerate anyone here (he has kind words for almost everyone), but he does declare that by the end of Howard Cosell’s career, the tell-it-like-it-is guy had become “the world’s biggest pain in the ass.” He also takes a few jabs at producers Chet Forte and Mark Shapiro, but for the most part, the author is genial rather than vengeful.
A playful puppy of a memoir about a big dog career.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062314963
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
