Extraordinary experiences rendered in mostly ordinary prose.
The journeyman pitcher/author of The Bullpen Gospels: Major League Dreams of a Minor League Veteran (2010) returns with an account of his struggles to reach and succeed in the Major Leagues—and to find true love.
Hayhurst declares in an author’s note that he’s not interested in writing about “dirty laundry,” but there’s plenty of it on display. He offers grim portrayals of his father, mother and brother, as well as a dark portrait of a fellow minor-league pitcher he calls “Dallas,” who is, in a word, an asshole. Other characters also appear with various warts and imperfections—managers, pitching coaches, veterans who love to haze and others. About the only person who comes off consistently well is the author’s fiancée, Bonnie, whom he marries near the end. Hayhurst occasionally says some bad things and has a few locker-room tantrums, but for the most part he’s the Good Guy on a Quest. Early on he indicates his strong religious beliefs, but they don’t appear much thereafter—oddly, not even during the painful period when he first pitched for the Padres, couldn’t find the plate and lost his confidence. The author also makes an enormous demand on reader credulity when he reports everything in pages of verbatim dialogue with characters speaking in full, well-organized paragraphs, even when they’re outraged. And the chapters end with something snappy, as if Neil Simon were whispering suggestions for curtain lines in their ears. Overall, though, Hayhurst creates forward momentum. Despite our reservations about the narrative, we want him to succeed on the mound, to marry well and to live happily ever after.
Extraordinary experiences rendered in mostly ordinary prose.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3485-5
Page Count: 410
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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