Rather than a journalist’s or a biographer’s disinterested analysis, the author offers a fan’s notes.
A deeply admiring, fawning biography of the great St. Louis Cardinal.
Longtime New York Times sports columnist Vecsey (Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, 2006, etc.) wears glasses with deeply Cardinal-colored lenses throughout his anecdotal record of the Hall of Fame left fielder/first baseman, whose spectacular career—which included a .331 lifetime average and a record 24 All-Star selections—ran from 1941 to 1963. Readers who want details about Musial’s personal life will have to wait for a more rigorous treatment, as will fans who want thorough descriptions of specific games and seasons. But those who want repetitious pages about the wonders of the character of Stan the Man will find their appetites quickly sated. Vecsey narrates chronologically, but there are numerous brief interchapters highlighting moments in Musial’s life, generally designed to establish his sainthood qualifications—his acts of kindness and comments from adoring fans and former teammates. Rarely does the author say anything negative (Musial once refused to sign an autograph), but, otherwise, it’s trivia and treacle. Vecsey even ends with a personal memory of Musial’s warm hand after a recent handshake. The author celebrates Musial’s great 1962 season (he hit .330) but neglects to mention his subsequent year (.255)—or to note that in his final five seasons he hit over .300 only once. Repeatedly, Vecsey laments Musial’s inferior position to Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in most fans’ minds, attributing it to Musial’s self-effacing goodness. In perhaps the most egregious example of his tendentiousness, the author notes that Musial went to his St. Louis restaurant the night of the JFK assassination because he realized “his buddy had been gunned down, and the world needed to see Stanley.”
Rather than a journalist’s or a biographer’s disinterested analysis, the author offers a fan’s notes.Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-51706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: ESPN Books/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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