Reflections from horse country about equine bloodlines, as well as the author’s own. (20 b&w illustrations)
The offspring of a journalist tells of equine bloodlines and, not incidentally, his own family history.
Growing up, newcomer Sullivan, son of quirky sportswriter Mike Sullivan, was never a sports fan. Not long before he died, his father recalled for him the astonishing beauty of Secretariat when that great horse took the Derby a generation ago. The father’s reverie awakened something within the son. The result is an entertaining, often erudite history of horse matters beginning even before the animal became friendly to mankind. Sullivan fils reviews the use of the stud book and matters eugenic, both equine and human. He traces the lore of American thoroughbred racing from Britain, through Virginia to the Blue Grass State (which is blessed with favorable limestone geology) and on to Churchill Downs. Virtually all horsehood is considered, from hobby horses to full-blooded Arabians, horses in war and peace, literature and art, glory and commerce, history and fable, horses as symbol and horses as presence, horses bound for pasture and horses destined for the boneman. The preparation and auction of yearlings, the art and practice of training and the industry of racing all receive avid attention as we are taken to the author’s old Kentucky home and, finally, to Belmont. Sullivan is sad to note “that all this horseracing business is about the rich, for the rich are hideous. There is nothing they cannot ruin.” The diverting facts and opinion comprise very agreeable reportage. It is unreined information, cantering or tantivy. But it is not simply a love letter to horseflesh; it is a warm elegy for a man, a father, as well.
Reflections from horse country about equine bloodlines, as well as the author’s own. (20 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-17281-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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
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