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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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