It’s a pleasure to ride in the peloton alongside LeMond, who emerges from this account as America’s once-and-future cycling...
“It’s not the bicycle…it’s the legs”: a sprint through a big swatch of bicycling history, focusing on racer Greg LeMond’s triumphant return from disaster.
Veteran journalist de Visé (Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show, 2015, etc.) takes on a big story with that of LeMond, who, in the mid-1970s, came roaring out of a bicycle racing scene that “resembled Grateful Dead concerts, albeit on a smaller stage.” Nicknamed “Lemonster,” the determined young man came along at just the time that the U.S. bicycling scene was emerging from its backwater doldrums, a flowering celebrated in the contemporary film Breaking Away. LeMond famously went on to become the first American to win the storied Tour de France competition in 1986. The following year, while recuperating from an injury, he was accidentally shot while hunting and nearly bled to death, necessitating a long program of recovery. He survived to win twice more, in 1989 and 1990, when he “seemed…more nervous about his chances now than in 1989, when his odds were indeed slim, and more fearful of some mishap than in 1986, when the Tour director himself had fretted for Greg’s safety.” The author, who sometimes writes with the techno-geekery of the bicycle acolyte and sometimes with the breeziness of a practiced sportscaster, makes clear that LeMond accomplished all this largely through sheer determination. His opposite in all this, apart from a few diabolical French opponents, is Lance Armstrong, who “possessed the raw talent to become an elite athlete” but exhibited all the arrogance and weakness of character that would later lead to his expulsion from the sport for doping. In that matter, LeMond, now in his late 50s, has emerged as an advocate for racing reforms that include ending the practice of allowing cyclists to change bikes midrace.
It’s a pleasure to ride in the peloton alongside LeMond, who emerges from this account as America’s once-and-future cycling great.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2794-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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