Readers uninterested in tennis will find the detailed match coverage tedious, but Arsenault skillfully guides readers to...
A well-informed doorstop biography of Arthur Ashe (1943-1993).
Arsenault (Southern History/Univ. of South Florida, St. Petersburg; The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America, 2009, etc.) uses his vast knowledge of civil rights history to properly situate the pioneering black tennis star within American and world history. Just short of 50, Ashe died from complications related to AIDS, “a disease he acquired from a blood transfusion administered during recovery from heart surgery in 1983.” During his relatively short life, Ashe not only integrated big-time men’s tennis; he also served as a scholar of black history, a civil rights activist, an ethicist, and a diplomat without a portfolio. In the early stages of the massively detailed chronology, the author’s subject can seemingly do no wrong, but as the narrative progresses, Ashe begins to demonstrate his flaws, making decisions that prove unpopular or even counterproductive. One of the thorniest issues involved whether tennis professionals—especially those considered nonwhite—should boycott matches in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Ashe believed that an eternal boycott bordered on a simplistic nonsolution to racism, so he repeatedly sought a visa from the apartheid government. Arsenault chronicles Ashe’s childhood rise from the segregated tennis courts of Richmond, Virginia, to less-discriminatory amateur play in other locales. Despite Ashe’s extremely slight build as a child, he regularly defeated older, stronger players. The author cracks the puzzle of why Ashe became obsessive about starring in a sport usually limited to white country-club players. In fact, rarely has a biographer unearthed so much detail about a subject’s life during childhood and adolescence. One of the most fascinating pieces of the Ashe saga becomes clear as Arsenault narrates the story of how journalist John McPhee focused on the battle between Ashe and a white tennis star for a book that became the classic Levels of the Game (1968).
Readers uninterested in tennis will find the detailed match coverage tedious, but Arsenault skillfully guides readers to match point in a book that will be a go-to resource.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8904-7
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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