A tennis champ from the Thirties serves up memoirs, which include on-court action, movie-star friends, and credibility- defying WW II spy intrigue. The jockish Marble was the mascot of a San Francisco baseball team until her brother gave her a tennis racquet and she found her true gift. Under the tutelage of Teach Tennant, coach to the stars, Marble became a national-caliber player, but on a trip to Europe, she collapsed on the court. She was diagnosed as suffering from TB and told she would never play again. But encouraged by Teach and another of Teach's pupils, Carole Lombard, Marble learned to walk, then play, again. She went on to win Forest Hills in 1936, and then, after a long losing streak, hit her stride in the late Thirties, winning all the major titles in both singles and doubles until the advent of WW II put an end to the competitive tennis circuit. Her first romance, with a dashing Swiss banker named Hans, ended in disaster when Teach insisted that love and tennis couldn't mix. Marble was approached by US Army Intelligence and asked to go to Switzerland, where perhaps she could reconnect with her old beau Hans, suspected of aiding the Nazis in hiding their wealth. She went to teach clinics in Geneva and, sure enough, Hans contacted her; within days, she moved into his chateau. Best of luck, he drunkenly told her not only about the treasure in his vault, but where the key was hidden. She sneaked into the vault, photographed the conveniently available ledgers, and escaped—after a car chase and a shootout. Marble, who died last year, has brought lots of mildly diverting incident into play, but it all adds up to little in the way of insight, gossip, or historical flavor. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 21, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05839-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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
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