First-rate cultural history from a writer who touches almost all bases.
In this revisionist version of the Dodgers’ exodus from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, viewed by many as a journey from Eden to Sodom, the Prime Mover emerges as less like Satan and more like Moses—visionary, flawed and ultimately justified.
D’Antonio, who has written on aspects of cultural history from chocolate bars (Hershey, 2006) to spirituality (Heaven on Earth, 1992), enjoyed unlimited access to the huge archive of Walter O’Malley’s papers and has extracted numerous goodies. None, however, is more revealing that what must now be considered unquestionable fact. O’Malley (1903–79) labored assiduously to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, but was stymied at every juncture by Robert Moses, New York’s de facto czar of construction. D’Antonio interviewed myriad surviving participants in the story, players included, to uncover other uncomfortable facts. Even during the Dodgers’ late-’40s/early-’50s glory years, attendance at Ebbets Field was declining for many reasons: lack of parking, white flight to the suburbs, the rise of television. Meanwhile, large cities across the country craved major-league baseball franchises. Los Angeles and San Francisco were respectively courting the Dodgers and Giants, though Milwaukee scooped them both by acquiring the Braves from Boston. When O’Malley saw L.A.’s offer, and realized that there was slim hope for help in Brooklyn, he decamped and transferred the franchise to the West Coast. There, as the author notes, it has flourished spectacularly in one of baseball’s greatest stadiums. D’Antonio spices his forays into baseball business with plenty of baseball folklore. There are several pages on Bobby Thompson’s mythic home run, many on the advent and reign of Jackie Robinson. He sometimes has difficulty with balance, offering only a few swift sentences on Roy Campanella’s career-ending accident, for example. Readers may also wish for more about O’Malley’s private life. We see the franchise owner as a consummate politician, a true mover-and-shaker, but we get few glimpses of his Dodger-blue soul.
First-rate cultural history from a writer who touches almost all bases.Pub Date: March 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-856-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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
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