A gentle, affecting memoir.
The greatest baseball player of the dead ball era, and the most widely despised, tenderly remembered by his grandson.
Herschel Cobb grew up the middle child of alcoholic parents, his father a near-300-pound bruiser who physically and mentally tortured him until a heart attack put an end to the madness when the boy was 8; his mother, cruelly indifferent to the abuse, disastrously remarried and continued to administer her own brand of emotional pain. The only solace came from his Granddaddy’s occasional visits, phone calls, letters and, most of all, from summers spent with the old man at Lake Tahoe. There, Herschel learned lessons in humility, persistence, charity, self-reliance and responsibility. By then, Ty Cobb was well past his baseball heyday, at arm’s length from his surviving children, alone with his fabulous wealth from prescient investments in Coca-Cola and General Motors. He appeared to acknowledge the hash he’d made of his personal life—“Hersch, it was my fault. It was my fault”—and he reached out to his grandchildren in a way quite at odds with his ferocious reputation. A large part of this narrative’s charm lies in the little boy’s gradual awakening to his grandfather’s towering achievements in baseball and to his controversial legacy: “Granddaddy, what did you do? Who are you really?” The question turns out to be not so easily answered. Ty, almost pathologically competitive, famously played with a sharp-elbowed, spikes-high intensity that earned him many admirers and few friends. Particularly for those whose image of the Georgia Peach derives solely from the infamous Al Stump biography and the ensuing Tommy Lee Jones movie, this portrait of the lion in winter will come as a surprise.
A gentle, affecting memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-77041-130-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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