Cordial and courtly: Wilkens’s memoir is no classic, but it’s still of considerable appeal to roundball fans.
A welcome memoir by a pioneer of integrated pro basketball.
Writing with Akron Beacon Journal sports columnist Pluto, Wilkens recounts his long career as a player and coach—one of only two entrants in the Basketball Hall of Fame to be honored for his accomplishments in both roles. The son of an African-American father and Irish-American mother, Wilkens grew up in the 1940s in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, now largely black but then a polyethnic, polyglot neighborhood. “Only later,” he writes, “did I realize how unique this situation was and how it affected my life: I never doubted that people from different races could work with each other and be friends, because I saw it every day of my life while growing up.” Wilkens’s catholicity was put to the test when, after earning an economics degree with distinction, he first went in to the NBA and confronted segregation within and without the arena. His offended sense of justice takes second place in this narrative, however, to straightforward sports memoir, as he relates his episodic education in how the game of basketball can and should be played. Evidently, Wilkens’s keyword is respect, for, despite having had to deal with ego hounds like Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley, he has almost nothing but warmly generous words for his players and colleagues. Still, at many points, especially when considering modern players’ huge salaries (as a rookie he had to work during the off-season as a salesman to make ends meet) and team perks like private first-class jet travel and hotel suites, Wilkens longs for the relatively pure old days, when basketball games “weren’t played in luxurious arenas with corporate boxes with wine and cheese and caviar. . . . They were played in something called an ‘armory,’ an old barn of a building that smelled of stale cigar smoke, spilled beer, and hot dogs on the grill.”
Cordial and courtly: Wilkens’s memoir is no classic, but it’s still of considerable appeal to roundball fans.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87374-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
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
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