Fans of the Warriors and especially of Curry will enjoy the book, which has its virtues in terms of depth and insight, but...
A hagiographic look at an NBA star with a lot of career ahead of him.
Steph Curry is a bona fide superstar. The point guard for the Golden State Warriors has won two MVP awards and has led his team to consecutive NBA Finals appearances, winning in 2015 and losing in a heartbreaking seven-game series to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016. He is also largely responsible for the resurrection of the Warriors, who languished near the bottom of the league for years. “Worse than being bad, worse than being onto something and blowing it on the biggest stage, the Warriors were irrelevant,” writes Bay Area News Group sports columnist Thompson. Now, the Warriors are once again at the top of the Western Conference this season, and there is a case to be made that Curry is the greatest three-point shooter in league history. Furthermore, he is charismatic and compelling, with a beautiful family and a great back story: the son of a former NBA star who attended a midmajor school, Davidson, far more well known for academics than for athletics. By all accounts, he is a genuinely good guy. So this book, about one of the NBA’s biggest and most marketable stars, is not surprising. However, this treatment of an athlete with many years to go before retirement feels opportunistic. To be sure, the author is a fine journalist with sound insight into the NBA and especially Curry and the Warriors, a team he has covered for many years, but the book is so laden with praise that at times it reads like an extended press release.
Fans of the Warriors and especially of Curry will enjoy the book, which has its virtues in terms of depth and insight, but the rest can wait until Curry’s career is over for a more fully fleshed and less-adulatory biography.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4783-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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