An engaging read with insights and stories that basketball fans in particular will value highly.
The renowned broadcaster and former NBA star looks back at his life and influences.
Smith, a two-time NBA champion, co-host of TNT's Inside the NBA program, and broadcaster for CBS/Turner’s coverage of March Madness, delivers a smartly structured memoir that reinforces the significance of relationships, perspective, and social awareness in the making of a champion. He chronicles his story primarily through the lens of his bonds with several champions both on and off the court. Refreshingly absent is the phrase "as told to (sportswriter name)" normally associated with memoirs from celebrities and professional athletes. This book—largely inspired by pandemic lockdowns and racial unrest in the U.S. in the past few years—is clearly Smith's alone, written for his children and the readers he invites "as if you are one of my family members.” The author describes his multicultural upbringing in Queens, his time playing for Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina, and his professional playing career. He examines his relationships with a variety of people across his entire life, including his legendary high school and college coaches, college teammate Michael Jordan, and superstars such as Magic Johnson and the late Kobe Bryant. Smith demonstrates how understanding the winning mindsets of these seminal figures shaped his maturation on and off the court. This is particularly evident in the chapter featuring his TNT co-host Charles Barkley, with whom he has publicly disagreed about social, racial, and political issues. Perhaps the finest chapter details Smith's first NBA season, with the Sacramento Kings, during which he was coached and mentored about winning and social action by Bill Russell, who won 11 NBA titles as a player. “He taught me to be a professional,” writes the author, “and showed me what it looked like to be a strong, self-assured Black man.” Throughout, Smith writes with detailed recall and focus.
An engaging read with insights and stories that basketball fans in particular will value highly.Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780385548052
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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