A thorough yet static portrait of one of the most accomplished players of baseball's ``golden age.'' ``I have never been a yes man,'' declared Rogers Hornsby in a 1950 interview, and this statement sums up his character. Alexander (History/Ohio Univ.; Our Game: An American Baseball History, 1991) depicts his subject as a man of strange contrasts: a teetotaler but also an inveterate gambler; a devoted son but by most accounts an absentee (and occasionally indifferent) father. Born in 1896, Hornsby was raised by his widowed mother and spent his youth working the stockyards in and around Fort Worth, playing industrial-league ball whenever time permitted. Initially undersized and unspectacular, he eventually grew into a player worthy of reckoning, generally acknowledged as the sport's greatest right-handed hitter. In 1915, at the height of a talent war initiated by the upstart Federal League, Hornsby joined the National League's St. Louis Cardinals and quickly became the senior circuit's best-known, best-paid star. But he had a prickly nature and wore out his welcome with the Cards (and their brilliant martinet of a general manager, Branch Rickey) after he led the team to their first World Series championship in 1926. Gradually, after playing relatively short stints for a succession of teams including the Giants, Braves, and Cubs, Hornsby became something of a baseball vagabond; itinerant employment, failed marriages, and mounting gambling debts frequently brought him to the brink of insolvency. However, owing to his professional reputationhe was named by baseball writers to the ``all-time all-stars'' in 1957he remained involved in some capacity with the game until his death in 1963. Alexander conveys an impressive wealth of facts, though his narrative seldom jumps off the page; nor does he satisfactorily explain how the game changed during Hornsby's career. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-2002-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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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