Only a kid on the loose in a candy store would display more sheer joy than McGough at his great good luck.
A winsome little reminiscence of two years spent at the Bronx Zoo.
McGough had no connections to the New York Yankees organization when he sat down and wrote them for a job as batboy as he was about to enter his junior year in high school. But out of the blue he got the job, a plum for any young Yankees fan. Well, a plum until he found himself swabbing filthy sinks, shining shoes, gathering up dirty laundry, and lugging overstuffed trash bags leaking tobacco juice to the Dumpster. Still, it was a small price to pay for getting to know so many of his heroes, and most of them were real bricks to McGough, making him welcome and making him feel like a necessary cog in the great machine. Now a 29-year-old lawyer, the author writes with polish but manages to maintain a tone of innocence and awe in his narrative. Naturally, not all his time was spent rubbing shoulders with the players in the dugout, but a handful of stories relate adventures only someone in McGough’s unique position could experience. He got to drive a player’s car home from a Florida training camp and had amusingly thwarted encounters with college girls on spring break. He was ensnared in a pyramid scheme trying to cash in on box seats. He went on a couple of chaste dates with girls in the stands, lured by the pinstripes. By his second year, McGough was getting dumber rather than wiser. He concocted a scam to trade phony player autographs for CDs, and it backfired (though he didn’t get burned). Anyone who ever harbored an unmitigated distaste for the Yankees front office will be somewhat mollified by learning that the Yankee Foundation gave the author a critical $10,000 scholarship to attend Williams College.
Only a kid on the loose in a candy store would display more sheer joy than McGough at his great good luck.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51020-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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