With acumen, Knight delivers an elegant précis of a baseball team’s season, and you don’t have to be a Dodgers fan to enjoy...
A searching portrait of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2013 season, from ESPN Magazine writer Knight.
When the Guggenheim Partners purchased the Dodgers in mid-2012, they paid $2.15 billion for a fixer-upper ball club with a ramshackle stadium to match, its concrete bones as osteoporotic as those of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. But the firm’s deep pockets would help turn the Dodgers around, on the field, in the front office, in mood, in chemistry, and in paying big for stellar talent. It wouldn’t buy them a World Series, that year or the next, but the talent made for an exciting season, which Knight chronicles with style and discernment. She knows the science of the game, its strange geometry and freakish physics, as well as its history and etiquette. She knows the patois, and she administers it discriminately: a pitch’s deception, the “lack of sock in his swing.” Knight also understands the giddiness and awe experienced by fans throughout the season; each new day is cause for hope, with each blunder—and loss—causing a great ache. Many personalities emerge as the season progresses—e.g., pitching great Clayton Kershaw and odd fellow Yasiel Puig, so culturally oblivious that he “hailed from Cuba but he may as well have been from Mars,” albeit a Martian adept at “smacking home runs and gunning down runners and generally playing like an inspired maniac fans couldn’t take their eyes off.” There’s also general manager Ned Colletti, who “preferred cowboy boots to calculators”—so much for analytics—and “refused to suffer coddled ballplayers.” Throughout the book, the author offers interesting nuggets for baseball fans, from gamesmanship to the bravery of closers to the stage 4 cancer a fat salary or ego can inflict on the clubhouse.
With acumen, Knight delivers an elegant précis of a baseball team’s season, and you don’t have to be a Dodgers fan to enjoy it.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7629-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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