An enjoyable tale of a storybook season.
A fond remembrance of a legendary baseball team and the teammates who kept in touch throughout the ensuing decades.
On Oct. 16, 1969, the New York Mets defeated the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles to win the World Series. Playing in right field for those Mets was Shamsky (The Magnificent Seasons: How the Jets, Mets, and Knicks Made Sports History and Uplifted a City and the Country, 2016), who—along with sportswriter Sherman (Kings of Queens: Life Beyond Baseball with the ’86 Mets, 2016, etc.)—offers a narrative of that season and later memories anchored by the teammates’ 2016 trip to visit ailing pitching ace Tom Seaver. On paper, the 1969 Mets were average. Outfielder Cleon Jones finished third in the National League in batting average, yet no one on the team hit more than 26 home runs or drove in more than 76 runs. The team succeeded because of two main factors: the guiding hand of their manager, Gil Hodges (“Sixty-nine would never have happened if not for Gil Hodges,” says Jones), and the fact that these Mets, in the words of first baseman and World Series MVP Donn Clendenon, “epitomized the word team.” Thus Shamsky, who hit .300 that season, split time in right field with Ron Swoboda, who made a key catch in Game 4 of the World Series. Neither Clendenon nor Swoboda had played a single game in the National League Championship Series. The narrative of the season itself, which takes up two-thirds of the book, is informative and entertaining, and Shamsky effectively places the team’s magical year within the social and political contexts of 1969, including the moon landing, the Vietnam War (shortstop Bud Harrelson missed time to fulfill his military obligation), and the now-all-but-forgotten rioting in York, Pennsylvania. Moreover, the author persuasively argues that the team helped unify New Yorkers during a turbulent time. However, the reunion itself is somewhat anticlimactic, and Shamsky probably overstates his case that the ’69 Mets inspired the nation as a whole.
An enjoyable tale of a storybook season.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7651-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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