A heartfelt, sincere, mini–self-portrait by a man who epitomizes class.
One of the greatest golfers of all time offers up some stories and advice.
Palmer (A Golfer’s Life, 2000, etc.) is one of the best and best-loved of all golfers. The “King” (he admits he doesn’t like this moniker) feels this slight book is particularly important to him. Now 86, he realizes there are things “I still wanted to say to my friends in golf and to fans of the game in general.” The book is very conversational, as if he were right there talking to you. Packed with stories and a few tips, it’s divided into three sections: Golf, Life, and Business. The chapters are short, some only a couple pages. Palmer begins with his “tough, taciturn disciplinarian” father, a greenskeeper (and later the pro) at the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvania. He showed a 3-year-old boy how to grip a club, stand, swing, and, most importantly, show good sportsmanship. Palmer adhered to most of this advice, especially the last one. He has always been gracious in defeat, and the fans—Arnie’s Army, a phrase born in 1959—love him for it. He chides young pros who chicken scratch their signatures for fans; take your time and do it right, he says. He admits to being a “strong-minded person and maybe a bit stodgy.” One of his “most favorite personal golf memories” was the day he shot 60 at Latrobe. He’s made 20 aces and owns 2,000 putters and 10,000 clubs. The golfer he holds in the “highest esteem of all” is Byron Nelson, but the player he always wanted to beat—“to a pulp”—was Jack Nicklaus. Palmer’s advisers were against him starting the Golf Channel. He said: “Let’s do this.” And that famous tea and lemonade drink? He “concocted it one afternoon with the help of my wife.”
A heartfelt, sincere, mini–self-portrait by a man who epitomizes class.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08594-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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