A sports book worth talking about, and a moving portrait of a great athlete and his era.
A lively study of the life and times of basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, “the twentieth century’s greatest pure athlete,” focusing on an extraordinary night.
Then 25 years old, Chamberlain had already made a name for himself in the NBA, racking up significant victories for the Philadelphia Warriors and a significant record as the league’s leading scorer. As Pomerantz (Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, 1996) writes, Chamberlain was still in the process of becoming himself, though what a process: he could run the 440 in 49 seconds, broad jump 23 feet, and lift 625 pounds, and he was quickly emerging as “the most striking symbol of basketball’s new age of self-expression and egotism—a development slightly ahead of the overall popular culture.” On March 2, 1962, the Warriors met the New York Knickerbockers in Hershey, Pa. Chamberlain was 237 points short of a record of 4,000 points for the 1961–62 season, while “no other NBA player had ever scored even 3,000 points,” and the well-oiled Knicks machine was but a minor obstacle. Chamberlain never heard the adage “there’s no I in team.” His teammates resented him, and in turn he “didn’t seek friendship from them, only the basketball.” Yet on that night even they were inclined to give him his due as he churned up his 100 points in a white-hot game that closed 169–147. (When Chamberlain hit the magic number, a boy came up to him, shook his hand and ran off with the game ball. (After Chamberlain’s death in 1999, Pomerantz writes, the “borrower” sold the ball for $551,000.) But few outside Hershey paid attention to the victory, which, Pomerantz writes in a nice turn, “became a sunken galleon, resting on the ocean floor.” Race may have had something to do with it—but, in those quieter times, the media hadn’t yet saturated our lives, and people found other things to expound on than sports.
A sports book worth talking about, and a moving portrait of a great athlete and his era.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5160-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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