A skillfully told, affecting memoir of sports and social activism.
A former professional basketball player looks back on his life on and off the court, with an emphasis on how his outspokenness regarding racial discrimination led to his unofficial banishment from the NBA.
Hodges was a three-point specialist whose skill helped the Chicago Bulls to back-to-back championships in 1991 and 1992; he also played for other NBA teams and enjoyed a successful 10-year career. However, as a black man who rarely shied away from challenging racial stereotypes—he grew up sending letters to members of Congress about significant issues—Hodges experienced dismay and then anger that almost all of his NBA colleagues refused to challenge the rich, white ownership establishment. Given that about 75 percent of the league’s players identified as black, Hodges preached the gospel of strength in numbers. In college at Long Beach State, he excelled academically as well as athletically and thus felt better prepared than most of his colleagues to present their grievances effectively. Unfortunately, the NBA stars of the 1980s and ’90s refused to heed his call; his ex-teammate Michael Jordan, the biggest of all the stars, does not come off well. Hodges hypothesizes that what he considers moral cowardice is linked to players seduced by huge salaries, fan adulation, and the cocoon of the NBA validating black manhood. He notes the rare exceptions, such as Lamar Odom and, to a lesser extent, Kobe Bryant. At the beginning of the book, the author sets the stage by recounting an invitation to the White House by President George H.W. Bush. Instead of wearing a traditional suit and greeting the president meekly, Hodges wore a dashiki and delivered a letter to Bush about the nation's shortcomings, many of them related to racial discrimination. Hodges' eventual banishment from the NBA caused him to occasionally second-guess his activism and led to bouts of depression, but he never surrendered his convictions.
A skillfully told, affecting memoir of sports and social activism.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60846-607-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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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