Exciting game action blended with mostly interesting behind-the-scenes maneuvers and manipulations of a pro-sports franchise.
A sports journalist debuts with a very personal account of the return of LeBron James to Cleveland in 2014 and of the Cavaliers’ NBA championship in 2016.
Lloyd—the lead NBA writer for the Athletic and former writer for James’ hometown Akron Beacon Journal during the team’s efforts to lure the King back to Cleveland after his dramatic 2010 departure to the Miami Heat—tells several interlocking stories: James’ decision to leave the team, the four intervening years when the Cavs’ front office began plotting to get him back, the arrival of key players (especially Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love, and J.R. Smith), accounts of failed coaches (David Blatt’s tale is especially painful), the changes in the NBA itself, and, of course, that championship that erased decades of frustration for Cleveland sports fans. (Lloyd reminds us several times of the key misplays and failures of the Indians and Browns.) The author deals thoroughly with the front-office attitudes and decisions about losing frequently so that the franchise would earn a good draft position. He also tells us a bit about himself, discussing a sports journalist’s difficulties in balancing family and professional responsibilities, and he describes some of his coups and failures; he even tells us near the end that James gave him a nonverbal shoutout at the city’s massive street party for the Cavs after their championship. At times, Lloyd does veer near homer-hood when he celebrates coach Tyronn Lue, who “was masterful with his lineups throughout the postseason,” and during his long account of Game 7 of the 2016 Finals. Most interesting to general readers will be the pages dealing with the intricacies of NBA management, the relationships among the players (Love’s complicated story is key), and the staggering egos of professional athletes.
Exciting game action blended with mostly interesting behind-the-scenes maneuvers and manipulations of a pro-sports franchise.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4190-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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