A solid sports memoir that explores more than just sports.
A former Major League Baseball player offers an affecting account of his unique professional career and dramatic personal life.
Most baseball memoirs hold little appeal for readers who are not already devoted fans. With assistance from sports journalist Brown (co-author, with Jim Abbott: Imperfect: An Improbable Life, 2012), Ankiel offers more, providing candid accounts of his abusive father, battered mother, and criminal brother; the dilemma he faced at age 18 regarding whether to attend college or immediately enter professional baseball, which involved becoming an instant millionaire; his amazing success as a pitcher in the minor leagues after attaining wealth overnight; his dizzying rise and equally dizzying fall with the St. Louis Cardinals; his seeming retirement from baseball, only to work his way back as an outfielder instead of a pitcher; and his final retirement at a young age to spend time with his wife and sons. Despite all those narratives, the memoir hangs together well, as the author uses the story of his sudden anxiety disorder to explore universal experiences of human vulnerability, regardless of a person’s level of accomplishment. All the way through his teen years, Ankiel could pitch a baseball with extraordinary speed and accuracy. Suddenly, though, in the middle of a Cardinals playoff game in 2000, his skill rapidly deteriorated. There was certainly anxiety, but also a seemingly inexplicable mind-body disconnect. One of the most intriguing figures in the book is sports psychologist Harvey Dorfman, who died in 2011. Dorfman did everything he could to help Ankiel through his problems, and he also served as a father figure of sorts while Ankiel’s cruel biological father spent time in prison. Cameos by numerous MLB players, managers, and coaches from the six teams that Ankiel played for add interest for baseball fans.
A solid sports memoir that explores more than just sports.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61039-686-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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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