Appealing, affecting stories too often prevented from soaring by the weight of hero-worship and self-regard.
Nature’s four seasons are inadequate, we learn in this scattered, disjunctive memoir by one of the deans of diamond writing. We need a fifth—baseball season.
Although he doubles as a novelist (The Ghost of Major Pryor, 1997, etc.), it is the baseball diamond that most engages Honig, who has produced a head-high stack of volumes over the course of several decades (Classic Baseball Photographs, 1869–1947, 1999, etc.), many dealing with the lumber-waving, flame-throwing demigods he’s idolized since childhood. Here, he wanders through his memories, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes with the aimlessness of a patron lost in a labyrinthine museum imagined by Steven Millhauser. He recalls favorite moments from games past, interviews aging, often reluctant and irascible players and describes his brief flirtation with glory after being signed by the Red Sox. (He traveled to Florida, attended a minor-league camp, impressed few with his pitching, lost his virginity in a beach scene out of From Here to Eternity, failed to survive the first cut and returned swiftly home, where he soon realized that writing was his game.) The strongest sections deal most directly with his life. The most powerful of these describes a late-night visit to his old neighborhood in Queens after decades of absence. Wandering the back streets, he sees “the figure of the boy who had walked here those years ago plotting and designing his future, which was now my past.” Instead of ending with this affecting image, Honig offers a few more superfluous stories about meeting Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and ends with a daffy riff on global warming—hey, it would give us a longer baseball season! Much more effective are his interviews with the long-forgotten pitchers, infielders and sluggers who populate the less-lofty regions of baseball’s Mount Olympus.
Appealing, affecting stories too often prevented from soaring by the weight of hero-worship and self-regard.Pub Date: March 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56663-810-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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