A memorable meditation likely to resonate deeply with sports fans everywhere.
Sports talk radio show host Tournour recalls his employer, their friendship and what they learned about life together.
For many people, "JT the Brick" is to sports what Edward R. Murrow was to World War II; legions of fans tune in to his radio shows for discussions of all the latest news. After walking away from a safe job in the financial industry, Tournour built a radio career from scratch with help from a Miami program director named Andrew Ashwood, and the two men became friends as well as business partners. Their relationship went through the peaks and valleys that most longtime friends endure, including miscommunications and oversights that led to hurt feelings, as they weathered changes in the business they both attended to with devotion, overcoming the competition over and over again. When Ashwood was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he turned to Tournour for support, and the bond between them took on a new level of strength. “The Handoff” of the title refers to the lessons—about living, work, mortality—that Tournour gleaned from being at Ashwood’s side throughout his chemotherapy treatments. The book at first seems like another overly self-aggrandizing, look-at-how-I-conquered sports memoir, but as it shifts into an exploration of the men's friendship, and then into a frank portrait of grief and loss, the bravado and machismo of the early chapters is put through the wringer. The lessons, previewed in chapter titles like “Don’t Back Down,” transcend pep-talk cliché and carry genuine weight. Ashwood's and Tournour's stories combine here in a way that lifts the book above others in its genre.
A memorable meditation likely to resonate deeply with sports fans everywhere.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2790-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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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