Fotheringham draws Hinault to fierce perfection: a workingman born to the bicycle seat, massively successful because he had...
Guardian cycling correspondent Fotheringham (Half Man, Half Bike: The Life of Eddy Merckx, Cycling's Greatest Champion, 2013, etc.) recalls the days when bicyclists were bold and doping was second nature. "Leave me in peace; everybody takes dope," said French hero Jacques Anquetil—except the subject of this book, Bernard Hinault (b. 1954), who won five Tour de France titles.
Hinault's brilliant career—he was arguably the best competitive cyclist ever—fell between two tumultuous moments in cycling history. Nevertheless, he was a one-man extreme-weather event unto himself. He began competing in the early 1970s, following the retirement of Anquetil and the semiretirement of Eddy Merckx, and he continued until the rise of Greg LeMond and a whole new technological age. As Fotheringham writes in this fleet, personality-drenched book, Hinault was a throwback to Breton cycling at its most elemental and ferocious. The author is also fascinating on the rise of cycling as a sport in the period after World War II. It was insular and a bit clandestine—much like the French Resistance—complete with heroes and weekly events that tested the mettle of all participants. Hinault was built of such stuff. He was notoriously prickly—he once said “he wished he had a jacket with tacks on it, to ward off back slappers who would hassle him after stages”—and he was brash, busting up the time-honored events simply by winning them, and screw the veterans’ scripts. He was brutish, he possessed extreme endurance, and he loved a challenge. In short, he was the Badger: strong, tenacious, and always spoiling for a fight. “I’m not a nice animal,” he reflected in retirement.
Fotheringham draws Hinault to fierce perfection: a workingman born to the bicycle seat, massively successful because he had the grit and no need for better living through chemistry.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-418-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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