A rags-to-pinstripes tale of America’s game with placement, velocity, and hubris, likely to go post-season. (Illustrations)
Baseball’s bellicose lefty produces a text packed with a pitcher’s pleasures and pains.
Wells is a kick-ass kind of guy, and so was his biker-babe Mom, Attitude Annie. Raised without Dad, his father figures were Mom’s pals, the local Hell’s Angels. The welfare kid got older and bigger; growing up was another story. If a game doesn’t go according to plan, Boomer may still wreck the dugout furnishings to the tunes of Metallica. Altercations with civilians are not unknown. Yet the guy could always throw smoke. Starting from the Medicine Hat farm club (with an interlude living in the back of a van and bussing tables), he was traded from Toronto to Milwaukee, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. But in the bigs, the place he yearned for was Yankee Stadium. Now the home of his hero, Babe Ruth, is home to David Wells, who recalls here the day he wore Ruth’s cap to the mound. In greater detail, he describes his duels with sluggers and swingers, pinch hitters and pull hitters. Major outings are deconstructed inning by inning, pitch by pitch. Casual spectators and rabid fans will learn much about working the hitters and how it is to pitch a perfect game while hung over. Don’t forget the gout, the chips in the elbow, and the chips on the shoulder. Then there’s the money. (This once-poor hurler cries “throw me a bone,” by which he means incentives in the millions.) People like David Cone, Spanky Anderson, Joe Torre, Cal Ripkin Jr., the ineffable Marge Schott, and Boss Steinbrenner make appearances, but personal matters, like family life, get just a nod; this is about baseball. And it’s pure locker-room trash talk, jock-jokey and fun. If last year didn’t earn a championship ring, just wait.
A rags-to-pinstripes tale of America’s game with placement, velocity, and hubris, likely to go post-season. (Illustrations)Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050824-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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