Despite the tawdry ending, Montville clearly had fun creating a playful buzz of words to raise the ghost of The Splendid...
Snazzy biography of The Kid that manages to be subtly characterful and thorough at the same time.
This portrait of baseball legend Theodore Samuel Williams (1918–2002) is sweeping and sweet, the images coming at the reader like jump-cuts to catch a moment or a tone. As he deserves, Williams gets double-barreled treatment. He was, Montville (At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt, 2001, etc.) makes plain, a self-centered, willful motor-mouth with a penchant for rococo, profane poetry whose temper and un-sportsmanlike antics kept him at loggerheads with Red Sox fans. He also could swing a bat like no other and gave his spark to the comfort and pleasure of kids. The author’s Beantown background (he was formerly sports columnist at the Globe) gives him access to all manner of Boston characters, from mayors, university presidents, and Harvard’s athletic director to broadcasters, coaches, batboys, and Williams’s brother’s son, for starters. Their reminiscences almost always lift Williams out of one morass or another he has gotten himself into with his penchant to shoot from the hip. Most beguiling is Montville’s delineation of Williams’s incandescent relationship with the Boston press corps, particularly the likes of Dave Egan, Austen Lake, and Huck Finnegan, reminding us that words, in the paper and on the radio, were how people related to sports in the age before TV. The text also covers three marriages, lasting unmarried love with Louise Kaufman, and his children. Williams’s military service in WWII and Korea seems simple in comparison. It all ends with a bump and a thud and a lot of ice when Williams’s son John-Henry has his father’s remains frozen, the coup de grâce in a long string of opportunistic acts.
Despite the tawdry ending, Montville clearly had fun creating a playful buzz of words to raise the ghost of The Splendid Splinter.Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50748-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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