Heresy to some, Vincent’s parting words are apt: “Baseball is an entertainment, an escape. It is moving and dramatic, and...
Diverting tales from the big league—gifted with a low-key crackle—courtesy of baseball’s ultimate inside angle, by former (1989–92) Commissioner Vincent.
These stories are expressions of love for baseball, touching equally on good and bad moments, yet always affectionate and filled with the hope that the institution will do the right thing. There are plenty of bite-sized treats (Ted Williams on Warren Spahn: “If a right-handed hitter is up with a man on first or first and second with less than two outs, Spahnie always threw him that horseshit screwball”; Yogi Berra on what makes a great manager: “Good players”), quick recollections, and dabs of color on the field of play. But Vincent also feels compelled to set out the full story on a couple of incidents, including the eviction of Pete Rose from baseball (here readers will sense a man who truly believes in the game as a moral vehicle) and the earthquake that shattered the 1989 series in California. Like any good baseball aficionado, Vincent has his lists: all-time lineups, BoSox lineups, modern lineups (for Vincent, “modern” can go back to the 1940s), Negro League lineups, and an eye-opening one on umpires that reveals the magic word that will get players thrown out of a game, clarified by veteran ump Bruce Froemming: “If a player says, ‘That was a horseshit call,’ he’s fine. If a guy says, ‘You're a horseshit ump,’ you ring him up. He’s gone.” There are some deliberate character assassinations—George Steinbrenner gets roasted, as does Marge Schott, the insufferable owner of the Cincinnati Reds. And there are also some unintentionally telling comments: “Over the course of the contract, Winfield was paid about $23 million, a vast sum then.”
Heresy to some, Vincent’s parting words are apt: “Baseball is an entertainment, an escape. It is moving and dramatic, and for millions of us, it’s an important part of our lives. But it is not life itself.”Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-4452-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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