Better than your average memoir of rise, fall and redemption.
Pitching great Gooden tells the story of his spectacular baseball career and the loss of it all through a devastating cocaine addiction.
By age 21, Gooden had won Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young pitching awards, become the youngest player ever named an All-Star, and pitched on the 1986 Mets World Series winners. Yet, he missed the victory parade for the Series win because of an all-night cocaine binge. So begins this saga, written with the assistance of Newsday columnist Henican (Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, 2013, etc.), of a brilliant athlete bent on self-destruction. Raised by a loving yet volatile family, Gooden learned to pitch at an early age under the gentle tutelage of his father. But, as a 5-year-old, he witnessed his sister’s husband shoot her five times. Drafted by the Mets at 17, he began a meteoric rise to the big leagues and, eventually, cocaine addiction. For Gooden, cocaine was “love at first sniff.” While he pitched for 16 years, his life was, before and after baseball, constant turmoil: failed drug tests leading to a year’s suspension from baseball, in and out of rehab, multiple arrests ultimately leading to him becoming a fugitive from the police, for which he went to prison. Gooden tells his story straightforwardly and seemingly honestly, and he mixes in entertaining stories of his encounters with baseball luminaries from Pete Rose to George Steinbrenner, who supported and never gave up on Gooden. He talks in detail of his often strained relationship with fellow troubled Met Darryl Strawberry. Gooden finally kicked his habit on the TV show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. Now two years straight, he seems to have his life in order, and he emerges in these pages as a good guy who did dumb things.
Better than your average memoir of rise, fall and redemption.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02702-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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