Though not terribly propulsive, the text does remind us that the author witnessed some remarkable moments in sport,...
A genial, leisurely, occasionally choppy memoir from the veteran New York Times sports columnist.
Accompanying Berkow’s how-I-became-what-I-am narrative, which begins in boyhood and ends with a touching account of his father’s death in 2002, are anecdotes about characters as diverse as Judge Sirica, Groucho Marx, Muhammad Ali, P.G. Wodehouse, Marianne Moore, Mike Tyson, Tonya Harding and reporter Jayson Blair, whose egregious fabrications at the Times also affected Berkow. (He contends that the paper’s heightened concern about accuracy led to a nine-paragraph Editors’ Note that unfairly targeted minor omissions of attribution in one of his columns.) The author writes with great affection about his remarkable parents, especially his father, who appears throughout as the touchstone Berkow uses to assess his life. It’s been mostly successful, once he began to work hard in college. He began his climb to the pinnacle of his profession in Minnesota, where he covered high-school sports and car races, then moved to Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate (until he became too expensive for them) and finally to the Times and a Pulitzer. Berkow chronicles the dissolution of two marriages with an odd absence of affect, perhaps because relations remain amiable with both former wives. He displays much more emotion in describing his relationship with the legendary Red Smith, whom Berkow first contacted when he was an undergraduate. Berkow also takes a few shots: at Michael Jordan, for lacking moral courage, and at Indiana University’s “iron-fisted and iron-minded” coach Bobby Knight, for lying.
Though not terribly propulsive, the text does remind us that the author witnessed some remarkable moments in sport, including Ali-Frazier I and the 1989 World Series earthquake.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-689-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
