A provocative portrait sure to win as many fans and detractors as its red-hot subject.
A well-rounded treatment of one of baseball’s most celebrated and controversial figures.
In the first Reggie Jackson biography in years, Foxsports.com baseball columnist Perry (Winners: How Good Baseball Teams Become Great Ones, 2006) reaffirms the notion that when it comes to sports superstardom, monstrous talent combined with enigmatic character truly yields the stuff of legend. Few Hall of Famers have done it with the path-breaking mix of panache, bombast and raw achievement that defined Jackson’s career. Looking back on Jackson’s childhood—his parents were largely absent—the author argues that he “was a lonely child grown into a lonely man,” and he explores Jackson’s roots alongside fleshy chapters detailing his turbulent years in Oakland and New York. Walking away with 563 home runs, 1,702 RBIs, 14 All-Star trips, five World Series rings and two World Series MVPs, “Mr. October”—the moniker was somewhat wryly bestowed, writes Perry, by then-teammate Thurman Munson prior to Jackson’s historic three home runs in three swings in Game Six of the 1977 World Series—also had broken sports’ racial barrier in unprecedented ways. Infamous for portraying himself as his own biggest fan, Jackson refused to take lightly his mistreatment at the hands of Billy Martin, George Steinbrenner, Charlie Finley and others. In June 1977, railing after Martin removed him from the field mid-inning, Jackson lamented to a group of writers that the “Yankees are Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio and Mantle. I’m a nigger to them, and I just don’t know how to be subservient. I’m making seven hundred thousand dollars a year, and they treat me like dirt.” Interestingly, though, Perry points out Jackson’s repeated reluctance to serve as a black icon, wishing instead to be appreciated for his talents and compensated in a fashion befitting his white teammates.
A provocative portrait sure to win as many fans and detractors as its red-hot subject.Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-156238-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
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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