A simply told, deeply moving story, quite unlike the usual baseball book.
An affecting memoir about a remarkable man who raised three sons to become baseball champions.
Fans have always been intrigued by baseball families—the DiMaggios, the Alous, etc.—and the foremost family act of our era is undoubtedly the Molinas. Brothers Bengie, José, and Yadier, all catchers, together have six World Series rings. All are known as consummate professionals and outstanding defensive specialists. With the help of Ryan (The Water Giver: The Story of a Mother, Her Son, and Their Second Chance, 2009, etc.), Bengie Molina, the oldest, tells the story that accounts for their success. For 30 years a factory worker, Benjamin Molina Santana, “Pai,” coached his sons and others on the field across from their home in Puerto Rico, teaching lessons about punctuality, hard work, humility, teamwork, integrity, and respect. On that same field, he died of a massive heart attack at 58. As a youth, he’d played second base “like a scorpion,” but he never made the minor leagues. What kept him from even showing up at a Milwaukee Brewers tryout in 1973? What kept this man, who appeared to love baseball above everything, from fulfilling his dream? For years, Bengie strove to win his father’s respect, working hard to achieve the financial and professional success Pai never had. His account covers all the usual stops and stories attending any ballplayer’s rise through college, the minors, and his tenure with three major league teams. He includes some personal tales about his brothers, his own bitter divorce and eventual remarriage, but these are all incidental to his larger obsession: his relationship with and final assessment of his father. He comes to understand that he was entirely mistaken about his beloved Pai’s ambition, that it was likely no accident the Molina brothers all became catchers. After all, these are the men who, on the baseball field, are the coaches, the caretakers, the fathers, the ones who protect home.
A simply told, deeply moving story, quite unlike the usual baseball book.Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4104-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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