A fascinating look at one man’s improbable athletic journey, offering insight into one of sport’s most cerebral positions.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Platt (Only the Strong Survive: The Odyssey of Allen Iverson, 2002, etc.) tells the story of how Moyer turned a below-average career into the stuff of legend, becoming, at 49, the oldest pitcher in Major League Baseball history to win a game.
Released from the Texas Rangers in 1990 at the age of 28, Moyer’s career might well have been over. Instead, he went on to pitch for six more big-league clubs, win a World Series with his hometown Philadelphia Phillies and rise to No. 35 on the all-time wins list with 269. With a sub–90 mph fastball even in his prime, Moyer’s success is a slap in the face to the number-crunching statisticians manning professional baseball’s front offices. As the book’s title suggests, much of that success is credited to his never-say-die attitude and determination to prove doubters and naysayers—of whom there are many—wrong. Equally as much, if not more, is attributed to his mastery of the mental game, learned through his relationship with baseball psychology guru Harvey Dorfman. Though the book is presented as a memoir by Moyer, it is narrated entirely by Platt, who was there to witness the pitcher’s struggles as he attempted to come back yet again following a 2011 injury that should have ended his career. There’s more than enough drama in Moyer’s unique story to overcome the book’s slightly confusing chronology, and the subject comes across as one of professional sports’ all-too-rare truly good guys. But the real value here is in the portrait of the mind of an elite pitcher, revealing the inner structures of the game in a way that will deepen even a casual fan’s understanding and enjoyment.
A fascinating look at one man’s improbable athletic journey, offering insight into one of sport’s most cerebral positions.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2158-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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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