A sad, cautionary tale peppered with enough back stories to keep human-interest readers engaged.
Mendez debuts with a poignant tribute to her son, a promising high school and college baseball star cut down by a heart defect.
Joy, anguish and baseball fill the pages of this memoir, a letter of sorts written by Mendez to her youngest child, Ramiro, aka Toti. It recounts the details of his 20 short years, from his illegal adoption as a newborn in Spain to his untimely death in Florida. Brought into the fold of a comfortably middle-class Cuban-American family, Toti was raised in Miami, where baseball “is not just a sport, it is a religion and a culture.” He had the talent, the drive and the parental commitment to go all the way; he garnered headlines, won trophies and titles, and was on the radar of professional scouts. All that suddenly came to an end on April 2, 2000, when he collapsed and died only weeks after being diagnosed with previously undetected cardiomyopathy. Given to occasional flights of sentimental revelry, Mendez nonetheless articulately captures the extraordinary closeness and mutual devotion between mother and son. She offers a unique, inside view into the rigors, sacrifices and obsessions that define the buildup to a career in major league baseball. Along the way, she also shares a complicated family saga that includes her own childhood escape from Cuba—a move that took her family from wealth to poverty—her two marriages, her two troubled older sons, and a daughter and granddaughters that have given her reason to push forward. These days, Mendez spends much of her time fighting for more stringent mandatory medical testing for high school athletes to detect the kind of hidden abnormalities that took Toti’s life. Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that Toti never knew he was adopted, despite the fact he entered a family that had three older siblings, all of whom were sworn to secrecy.
A sad, cautionary tale peppered with enough back stories to keep human-interest readers engaged.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1935806301
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Reedy Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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