A high-school basketball star and standout at Brown University in the 1960s, Reynolds came face-to-face with the realization that he wasn’t as good an he’d hoped, that, despite all the hard work and dedication, his dream of playing in the pros was just that: a dream. As Reynolds (Big Hoops, 1989, etc.) grew up in Rhode Island, his life was defined by the game of basketball. The 6’3”, high-scoring forward believed all the coaches’ clichÇs about hard work and persistence. His hometown high-school team lost in the state quarter-finals his senior year, but the adulation, camaraderie of the locker room, and the special treatment followed him through a year at a private academy, where he went in hopes of qualifying academically for college. It worked, despite his flunking his courses: “A kindly man with a soft crinkly face” gave him a “transcript” showing he’d passed. It wasn’t long before he was on academic probation at Brown; but that scarcely interfered with playing basketball. Following a terrible loss against Princeton in the winter of 1968, he realized that it was all over, that he had to face life without basketball. But his career as an English teacher and assistant coach at his old school was short-lived. He’d begun to resent the hold the game had on him and that he’d “been naive enough to swallow all of it.” Reynolds drifted in and out of the counterculture of the times and from job to job doing freelance reporting. At 33, he was broke, “spending too many nights in bars . . . too many nights telling the same stories.” He decided he had to get himself together, to get back into shape by playing pickup games—where he finally learned to love playing basketball. A bang-up job by Reynolds. For all the failed Little Leaguers and average high-school and college jocks this is “the real story of sports in America.”
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18105-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
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