Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin’s...
A sympathetic examination of the fiery player and manager Billy Martin (1928-1989), who could dazzle between the lines but whose life outside the stadium was often boozy, libidinous, and rudderless.
Earlier in his own career, Pennington (On Par: The Everyday Golfer's Survival Guide, 2012, etc.), now a sportswriter with the New York Times, covered the Yankees during one of Martin’s five terms as manager under owner George Steinbrenner. The author even witnessed one of Billy the Kid’s late-career barroom brawls. As he notes, Martin, slated to return for his sixth stint as manager in 1990, was killed in an accident in his pickup truck on Christmas night—an accident the author both begins and ends with, devoting many pages to the controversy about who was driving that night, Martin or his friend William Reedy (who survived). Pennington interviewed myriads for this comprehensive work—from kings to commoners. Among the latter was a housekeeper at the end of Martin’s life, a woman who tried to make Billy more accurate at the urinal. Although he focuses principally on Martin’s professional career, Pennington also explores his family background in California, his lifelong problems with drinking, his fondness for fisticuffs (he would invariably swing first), his inability to be faithful to his wives (he was married four times), his cluelessness with money, and his celebrated feuds with Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, and others. All the notable moments are here—Cleveland’s Ten-Cent Beer Night, the dugout fracas with Jackson, the spats with umpires (the dirt-kicking and -throwing), the firings and rehirings. As the author shows, Martin could charm as well as disgust and disappoint, and Pennington argues that although his record merits the Hall of Fame, his erratic behavior has kept him outside.
Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin’s motley life.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-02209-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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