Drawing on the harrowing year he spent with Ty Cobb as ghostwriter of his autobiography, Stump pens an astounding portrait that leaves little doubt the Hall of Famer was ``psychotic throughout his baseball career.'' When they ``collaborated'' on My Life in Baseball in 1960, the Georgia Peach was a bitter, unreasonable, gun-toting, 73-year-old cancer-ridden drunk. Cobb's spectacular career (190528) was marked by ugliness and violence from the beginning. Just days before Cobb was called up to the big leagues, his father was shotgunned to death by his mother, apparently while trying to climb or spy through their bedroom window. She was acquitted of manslaughter, but rumors plagued her and her famous son the rest of their lives. As an 18-year-old rookie, Cobb faced such unbearable hazing from his Detroit Tigers teammates that he bought a gun to protect himself. He suffered a nervous breakdown in his second year and spent part of the season in a sanitarium. When he returned, his welcome was a hotel lobby brawl with his hated teammates that left a couple of them hospitalized—but Cobb led the team in hitting. The controversies, fights, and incidents so vividly recounted by Stump make today's ``troubled'' athletes look like choirboys. Cobb once beat up a black groundskeeper—and his wife—for touching him. Umpires, managers, teammates, opposing players, his wife and children—all who ``increased his tension''—were subject to fierce attack. But his baseball talent was such that many consider him the greatest ever to play the game. His records for hits and stolen bases stood until Pete Rose and Rickey Henderson, respectively, broke them. He won 12 batting titles. His most remarkable—and untouchable—feats were hitting over .300 for 23 consecutive seasons and his .367 lifetime batting average. (A movie about Cobb will be released this fall.) Stump's wonderfully descriptive writing, yeoman historical research, and personal knowledge of Cobb make this an extraordinary achievement in sports biography. (24 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-945575-64-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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 2026 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.
