For fans only.
An expatriate sportswriter finds comfort, entertainment and perplexity in the big business of British soccer.
After witnessing everything from the congressional baseball steroid hearings to Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, two-time Pulitzer nominee Culpepper had become quite cynical about his livelihood. In 2006, relocating to London “for the oldest reason in the book—love,” he left behind the corruption and blatant narcissism of American sports, as well as his privileged media observation post, to become an ordinary soccer fan. England’s Premier League provoked culture shock. Shabby, unadorned locker rooms were the rule, Culpepper found, even for superstar teams like Manchester United. Severely restricted media access to the facilities for pre- and post-game interviews enshrouded British teams in a certain mystery. Fan-seating segregation in stadiums, the unspoken understanding that closely seated spectators did not fraternize and the blatant overuse of expletives also proved head-turning. After much deliberation and attending months of games and related events, the author chose to align himself with an underdog team, Portsmouth. Though it held a dismal 19th place in the rankings, he watched the team improve steadily over the course of the season and observed its devoted, good-natured fans. Culpepper diligently makes comparisons between American and English sports ethics, but he also finds commonalities in the players’ hubris as well as their monetary greed. His love of soccer comes through as he navigates England’s complex, multitiered competition. What’s lacking, however, is sufficient material on the personal side of his experience. Culpepper’s staunch, unwavering focus on the sport itself may be honorable, but the result is an aloof chronicle marinated in factoids and lingo.
For fans only.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2808-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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