Baseball serves as a secondary backdrop for this entertaining autobiographical account of a middle-aged man’s pursuit of unfulfilled dreams. In the late 1950s, Jordan was a highly touted up-and-coming pitching phenom, but he managed only a few years of unsuccessful minor-league play. After leaving the sport in 1962, Jordan eventually became a freelance writer of articles and books (A False Spring, 1975, etc.), but despite his successes, he was still haunted by thoughts of what-could-have-been. Finally, at the age of 56, he returned to pitch one inning in a professional minor-league game for the Waterbury Spirit in Connecticut. While Jordan records vividly the chronology of this event and his physical and mental preparation for the challenge, the book is filled more with revelations of the author’s past and with present-day anecdotes, as he tries to make sense of his life’s time-worn journey. Some familiar sports names appear in the book, but it’s the excellently drawn cast of colorful players in Jordan’s life that dominate, including: Susan, his sensual and supportive wife; his older half-brother, George, a lawyer, whose unconditional love is mixed with wistful envy; and Brian LaBasco, the high school catcher who helps Jordan train and who reminds him of “the me I might have been.” Even Jordan’s pet dogs figure prominently: they teach him to love, genuinely and unabashedly. Jordan is a flawed and not particularly noble hero; in fact, his selfishness, weaknesses, and fears are revealed throughout. But this frankness is what gives overall credence to his story and ruminations, helped greatly by his skillful writing, which shifts easily from bawdy bravado to humor to insightful introspection. More a midlife coming-of-age memoir than sports book, a tale of growing older, of second chances, and of making peace with oneself.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-58238-028-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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