Fans will enjoy getting a peek into the life and quirks of this formerly media-shy player. As much an antidote to David...
Hard-driving Yankee outfielder O'Neill melds a sweet, plainspoken tribute to his father.
No wonder he played with such energy, enthusiasm, and savvy: the third generation of his family to enter professional ball, O'Neill was raised in the Church of Baseball. For his father, Chick, it “was less a game than a way of life, a set of rules and philosophies, challenges and opportunities that provided order in the universe.” When O'Neill writes that baseball embodies “hard work, sacrifice, courage, devotion to family and nation, overcoming hardship, reaching for dreams,” he's not just talking through his hat, but ticking off attributes he drew upon to make his career. His father worked to instill in O'Neill, a notoriously emotional player known for flinging his helmet or working over water coolers after missed opportunities in the batter's box, the understanding that sportsmanship was as important as great play, fun was the name of the game, and optimism would trump a lousy at-bat. This attitude didn't come easy, but his father was always there for him, encouraging and getting him back in line all the way through O'Neill's apprenticeship in the minors, his fine years with the Cincinnati Reds, and his triumphs as a Yankee. (Chick passed away during the 1999 World Series.) O'Neill covers his many career highlights, including those searing line drives, World Series by the peck, and three perfect games. He also makes intelligent comments on salaries and the value of fans, as well as nothing-but-blue-skies tributes to his teammates.
Fans will enjoy getting a peek into the life and quirks of this formerly media-shy player. As much an antidote to David Wells trash talk as we’re likely to get.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052405-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
PERSPECTIVES
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