A year on the NASCAR circuit with the third Petty to leave his mark on racing history. With 12 years of only middling racing success, Petty has found living up to the family name a curse and a challenge—but occasionally a joy as well. His four wins going into the 1992 season, as Gaillard (The Dream Long Deferred, 1988, etc.) notes, hardly measured up to the great success of his father, Richard ``The King'' Petty, who boasts the most wins in NASCAR history, or of his grandfather Lee Petty, winner of the first Daytona 500 race. As Gaillard shows, while Kyle ``didn't wallow in the burden of being Richard Petty's son,'' it may not be entirely coincidental that Kyle's best season, 1992, was also his father's last: two wins; $1 million-plus in prize money; fifth in the Winston Cup point standings. It was also Kyle's ``comeback'' year, following his multiple-injury wreck in May 1991 at Talladega. Petty started the new season by wrecking his car, Mellow Yello, in a qualifying heat at Daytona—a race he was desperate to win—and managed only a sixth-place finish in a relatively untested backup car. He then captured his third straight pole position at Rockingham, where he won in 1990 and 1991, only to crack a cam shaft with 65 laps to go. The next several weeks were marked by frustrating mechanical problems and mishaps, but new crew-chief Robin Pemberton patched things together and Petty took second and third in races at Charlotte. Toward the end of the season, he had an outstanding five-week run of top-five finishes. As backdrop, Gaillard limns Petty family, and racing, history, as well as the careers of top drivers like Davey Allison, Bill Elliott, and Dale Earnhardt. Stalls occasionally but, overall, a fairly smooth trip around the track. (For an overview of NASCAR, turn to Peter Golenbock's American Zoom, p. 834.) (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09732-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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