A candid, clever account, though readers who have never collected baseball cards may find it difficult to comprehend their...
Children’s nonfiction author Wilker (Everything You Need to Know About the Dangers of Sports Gambling, 2000, etc.) relates his life story through the lens of baseball-card collecting and his worship of his older brother.
Because the author’s mother wanted to live a simple, rural life, she left her husband to live with a free-spirited man in Vermont. Finding it difficult to make friends, Wilker created a fantasy life built around the baseball cards that he bought in bubble-gum packs. His more athletic, outgoing older brother sometimes participated in the baseball-card fantasy, but other times showed no interest. As Wilker’s hobby grew, he began to relate less to the star players than to the fringe players—Kurt Bevacqua, Herb Washington, David Clyde, etc.—who bounced between the major and minor leagues or stayed in the majors through persistence and luck more than skill. A fan of the Boston Red Sox, Wilker became emotionally attached to one All-Star, Carl Yastrzemski, but never dared to hope that Yaz would ever notice. Even into adulthood, the author drifted and sometimes depended on illegal narcotics to get through the days. He looked to his brother, his mother, her boyfriend and, eventually, to his biological father for affirmation, but found it only sporadically. Nearing 40, Wilker finally began to pull his life together. His transformation was partly due to the long-time frustrated Red Sox finally capturing a championship, but mainly because he met the soul mate who became his wife, settled in Chicago, made a kind of peace with each of his biological parents and rebonded with his brother.
A candid, clever account, though readers who have never collected baseball cards may find it difficult to comprehend their psychological hold on the author.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934734-16-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
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