A soufflé of anecdote, revenge served cold and self-promotion.
A Hall of Fame umpire calls the game of his own life, concluding, “By God, I loved every minute of it.”
Harvey, now an octogenarian battling oral cancer and the effects of strokes, teams with veteran co-author Golenbock (Glory in the Fall: The Greatest Moments in World Series History, 2010, etc.) to produce a breezy and sometimes-grumpy memoir about his years in major league baseball. There is no shortage of self-regard (see the subtitle), and the author repeatedly reminds readers that he was the best. Later in his text, he even repeats, virtually verbatim, a story he’d told earlier about being named the second-greatest umpire of all time. In most other ways, the text is yawningly conventional: We begin with Harvey’s boyhood during the Depression, his scholastic days (he excelled at basketball), his early marriage and divorce (his second marriage has lasted more than 50 years), his decision to become an umpire and his rapid rise to the big leagues (“faster than anyone else ever has”). Harvey also did some basketball refereeing (and was great at that as well). Along the way he settles a few old grudges (“asshole” appears throughout) and grinds a few old axes (low pay, wimpy commissioners, contentious players and managers). He soon tires of chronology and settles into an I-remember-when mode. Koufax was the best pitcher he ever saw; Musial, the best hitter; Mays, the best overall player. Pete Rose was great but deserves his exclusion from the game. Alleged spit-balling pitcher Gaylord Perry was “the cleverest motherfucker I ever saw.” Harvey revisits his close and controversial calls, the violence on the field (Juan Marichal hitting catcher John Roseboro on the head with a bat), the unionization of players and umpires, and the heavy drinking on the road.
A soufflé of anecdote, revenge served cold and self-promotion.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4878-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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