Nice guys do not always finish last, but they also do not necessarily make the most compelling subjects for biography.
Wilson (The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych, 2013) delivers a pedestrian treatment of an impressive baseball player and admirable man.
Brooks Robinson is, by all accounts, a wonderful, kind man. During his Hall of Fame baseball career as a third baseman with the Baltimore Orioles from 1955 to 1977, he was universally loved as a teammate and respected as an opponent. Growing up in Arkansas, he was raised in a close family, and he eventually had a close family of his own. Throughout his entire career, he was never the source of controversy; in fact, he seemed almost too good to be true. On the field, the third baseman was one of the greatest fielders in the history of major league baseball, a status already earned but cemented by his performance in the 1970 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, when he put on one of the most scintillating performances in the history of the game. At bat, Robinson accumulated respectable and intermittently impressive numbers (.267 career batting average and more than 2,800 hits), though without his glove, he almost certainly would have been a borderline candidate for enshrinement in Cooperstown. Baseball fans of a certain age will welcome Wilson’s biography of the Baltimore Orioles' star. However, the best sports biographies transcend the games the athletes play in order to reveal something significant about the man or the time in which he lived. Whether through the limitations of the biographer or his subject, this one does not. Since Robinson embodied the ideal of the mid-20th-century All-American athlete, the book often reads like a hagiographic Frank Merriwell tale come to life, including plenty of clichés and aw-shucks language.
Nice guys do not always finish last, but they also do not necessarily make the most compelling subjects for biography.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03304-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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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