Winner of 11 PGA tournaments between 1963 and 1971, Beard, whose golf game and life later ``went to pieces'' because of alcoholism, joined the money-rich Senior Tour in 1989. Here, with the help of Sports Illustrated writer Garrity, he records his every golf shot—and stray thought—on the 1991 circuit. Despite a second-place finish in the 1989 Senior Open, Beard has not become a big money-winner among the 50-and-over pros. The 1991 Senior Tour hosted 42 events with a total purse of $24 million. Beard took home $150,000 in 23 events; Jack Nicklaus, ``the best player who ever lived,'' won $343,734 in just five. The big money, Beard emphasizes, is not shelled out for quality golf or some notion of fierce competition: The ``Senior Tour is built on nostalgia,'' plain and simple, with spectators paying to watch old pros such as Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, and Sam Snead play together one more time. Often controversial, Beard, who writes a column for Golf World magazine, profiles some of his peers and discusses long-standing rivalries and often petty disputes; grouses about playing ``outings,'' pro- ams for charity for which the pros are paid; complains about caddie fees; and gives a lot of space to describing golf he's watched on TV. A recovering alcoholic, he attends from one to three AA meetings a week and sees a sports psychologist: ``When I play badly I see myself as a bad person.'' His worries about his swing and his confidence are duly noted in the epilogue: ``[my] nervousness and fear jump off the pages.'' And straying yet further from the links, he feels compelled to share even his views on evolution and creation. Fine when Beard stays on the golf course; preachy and self- indulgent when he doesn't.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-508060-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
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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