Golenbock barely stays within the foul lines in this Baseball Babylon catalogue of the late Yankees manager's career, his celebrated fistfights, hangovers, trysts with underage women, and battles with owners, players, and the press. In an overlong effort, Golenbock (Fenway: An Unexpurgated History of the Boston Red Sox, 1992, etc.) competently reviews Martin's playing days in the 1950s and his drunken carousings with Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford. He brings insight into the father- son relationship he had with Casey Stengel and their eventual falling-out. And Golenbock does a good job of retracing Martin's managerial odyssey: AAA Denver in 1968; winning the division with the Minnesota Twins in 1969 and being fired after the playoffs; his turnaround of the Detroit Tigers in 1971, capped by taking the division the following season, and then dismissal after a tumultuous 1973; being named Manager of the Year in 1974 for resurrecting the hapless Texas Rangers only to be fired in July 1975; then, his achievement of a lifelong dream in being named to manage the New York Yankees. All the well-publicized hirings and firings (five times by the Yankees), the womanizing and bar brawls, and the ugly fights with George Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, Jim Brewer, and others are here. While any biography of Martin would have to include Steinbrenner, Golenbock uses an inordinate amount of space to go after the domineering, controversial Yankees owner (a ``weak, self-centered tyrant'' and ``a real jock sniffer''). Steinbrenner's youth and teen years at Culver Military Academy, etc., receive lengthier, more detailed attention than Martin's background and childhood. And in asides to his recounting of the messy details of the 1989 auto accident that killed Martin, Golenbock takes his widow, Jill—and Steinbrenner—to task for having ``killed his spirit'' and ``ruined his life.'' Much of this is a rehashing of the author's earlier books on the Yankees, but it will, nonetheless, stir up controversy by reopening old wounds.
Pub Date: June 27, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10575-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
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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