Often candid and even self-deprecating memories by an athlete who once stood at the summit of his profession.
A former major league baseball All-Star and MVP—and current TV analyst for the New York Mets—reviews his boyhood and the dawn of his professional career and reveals some of the secrets of his success.
Although Hernandez claims that he doesn’t want his text to be like other baseball memoirs, in fundamental ways, it is exactly that. The author provides game-by-game accounts, descriptions of influences (good and bad and mixed), and details about influential managers such as Ken Boyer and fellow players, including Pete Rose—though the author does not comment on the Rose exclusion-from-the-Hall-of-Fame controversy. We learn about Hernandez’s Spanish heritage (though his teammates called him “Mex”), his flirtation with drugs, his sometimes-excessive drinking, and his struggles with his father, who trained him but ultimately couldn’t let go. But in his style, Hernandez does distinguish himself, offering a variety of chapters: flashbacks to boyhood (italicized), accounts of his current occupation as a broadcaster, and details about his journey through the minor leagues and into MLB, where, after experiencing some difficulties and frustrations, he soon emerged as a major talent. He alternates the chapters, shifting readers from past to present to past again, and he pauses periodically to elaborate on certain elements of today’s game that annoy him: the obsession with home runs and the consequent shrinking of baseball parks and the soaring influence of statistics (see Moneyball). Hernandez concludes one minitirade with this: “Boring, one-base-at-a-time, home-run baseball. Yuck.” We also learn some things about the author that may surprise readers—e.g., he likes to draw, and he collects first editions and works of art. Refreshingly, he also blames himself for the dissolution of his first marriage, confessing that he cheated on his young wife.
Often candid and even self-deprecating memories by an athlete who once stood at the summit of his profession.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39573-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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