An average game with no triple word scores.
The co-author of the bestselling Everything SCRABBLE© returns with a motley collection of anecdotes, advice, and autobiography—all relating, more or less, to the game he loves.
Williams’ text follows his decades of experience as executive director of the National SCRABBLE Association, a tenure that ended recently due, in part, to the profound changes in the landscape of the gaming world. There is a little bit of everything here, including an appendix of proscribed game words (the naughty, the insulting), a mildly ranting chapter about grammar and usage, and a chapter that includes advice on how to tell someone that he or she has committed a solecism. Williams tells us a bit about his own playing career—he had early success, then quit studying so much and fell from grace—and about his joining the SCRABBLE team with owner Hasbro Inc. He relates stories about the spread of the competitive game, even into schools. Middle school, he and his team discover, is the best level. (A high school kid once called him a dork.) There is a dull chapter about adult championships, and there are some near-fawning chapters about the author’s experiences with TV and movie celebrities. (Actor Jack Black is a devoted player; on his show, Jimmy Kimmel played against scholastic champions; the producers of the 2001 film The Wedding Planner ignored his counsel.) Williams also tells about declining an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart because he feared an ambush, and he includes an awkward section about why men/boys seem to win all the championships. The author chronicles his interviews with some top women players, who, unfortunately, don’t shed much light on this issue. Williams takes a few pokes at some of the Hasbro executives he worked for (he also praises many others) and seems quite happy that his appearance on an episode of Martha Stewart’s show is still on YouTube.
An average game with no triple word scores.Pub Date: June 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-87140-773-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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