A fine introduction to the racetrack that’s also a dazzlingly successful blind date, deeply and unexpectedly satisfying,...
A wonderfully expressive love story between Mooney, who writes for The Blood-Horse magazine, and that permanent adolescent of the horse world, the thoroughbred.
Mooney made the acquaintance of the racetrack through the inspired guidance of her grandmother, May-May, who knew everything there was to know about the track, having spent hours as a youth draped over the fence at Pimlico watching the horses and cut her teeth at the trotting tracks in Maryland. She gave the bug wholesale to her granddaughter, but when May-May died, so did Mooney’s attachment to the sport. In a graceful, forward style, Mooney traces her return to the racetrack to a broadcast of the Kentucky Derby she happened on while shopping at Radio Shack. Immersing herself in that world once again, she brings it, with great respect, to the reader. The elusive romance of the trainer’s life is typified by the trailblazing John Nerud and the intuitive, freewheeling Bob Baffert. Mooney charts the careers of two peerless riders, Angel Cordero Jr. and Donna Barton; salutes hotwalkers and grooms like Cleevie, who knows how to make a horse shine in bloom; and nods at the gamblers and the handicappers. She makes it clear she’s on the side of the risk-takers, for “to urge a horse to come into second or third seemed to run counter to our entire relationship.” There is the dreadful downside of drugged horses, drugged jockeys, and fixed races, but there is also the sheer glory of the animals, the “playful, moody, skittish, and temperamental, easily distracted and even more easily bored” thoroughbreds, which also happen to be sensitive, elegant, and impossible to tame.
A fine introduction to the racetrack that’s also a dazzlingly successful blind date, deeply and unexpectedly satisfying, between readers and thoroughbreds. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019853-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
