An intimate memoir of the Negro Leagues by one of its greatest players. Though Riley (The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, not reviewed) gets credit for helping Leonard write his autobiography, this book reads as if it were a verbatim transcription of Leonard's taped reminiscences. That is the book's weakness and its strength. It rambles and lacks consistent narrative structure, but it is also an important memoir of an era in American sports—and in American history—that has only begun to get the attention it deserves. The slick-fielding first baseman was one of the best hitters in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to 1950, and most observers believe that if it weren't for segregation he would have been a superstar in the major leagues. Leonard's memory is encyclopedic: He recalls plays and players from when he was a 13- year-old playing semi-pro ball in 1921 to his last game, at 47, in a Mexican league in 1955. He tells stories of grueling three-games- a-day schedules; of endless travel from one seedy segregated hotel to another; of lousy pay and breached contracts; and of winters spent in menial labor to make ends meet. Lou Gehrig, the white player to whom Leonard is most often compared, had a far more comfortable life, but Leonard expresses no rancor and only mild regret. Nor, at 87, does he romanticize the past. The Negro Leagues were not as good as the major leagues, he writes, and it is virtually impossible to measure black players of the era against their white counterparts. Leonard writes that Gehrig probably was a better player than he was. But he also wishes he'd had the chance to find out. An invaluable historical document and the record of a remarkable life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0119-6
Page Count: 274
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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
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
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