There will be little readership for the book outside of baseball fans, especially in the Atlanta area, but those fans will...
An Atlanta Braves legend tells his story.
When Jones retired from Major League Baseball at the end of the 2012 season, he did so as a franchise hero. One of the greatest switch hitters in the long history of the game, Jones, the 1999 National League MVP, eight-time All-Star, World Series champion, and one of the linchpins of the franchise’s glory years, played for his entire career, including 19 years in the major league, in the Atlanta Braves organization. In the parlance of some traditionalists, Jones played the game “the right way.” His autobiography, ably co-authored by Walton, who covered the Braves for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, tells about the life and career of a small-town Florida guy who wanted to play professional baseball from the age of 4. His main inspiration was his father, a former college baseball player and high school coach who became the primary influence on his career. Jones left his small town to play for a larger high school where his exploits earned him selection as the first overall pick in the 1990 MLB draft and a hefty signing bonus. Jones is no saint—he unflinchingly details his two failed marriages, one of which fell apart because of his serial infidelities that produced a child—but he doesn’t offer much in the way of true insight, maintaining the focus on his love of the sport, his approach to the game, and his successes and failures on the field. Jones was undoubtedly a great player but not a transcendent figure.
There will be little readership for the book outside of baseball fans, especially in the Atlanta area, but those fans will find a clear, readable old-school account of a player who almost certainly will be voted into the Hall of Fame, possibly as early as 2018, his first year of eligibility.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98440-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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