TV contributor, biographer, veteran sportswriter and young adult novelist Lipsyte (Center Field, 2010, etc.) revisits key events in his life, the sporting world, the lives of professional athletes and the evolving cultural significance of sports in America.
The author begins with an account of how he stumbled into journalism, landing a copyboy job with the New York Times not long after graduating from Columbia University. He had a skeptical eye practically from the beginning. As a chubby schoolboy, he had endured harassment from jocks. “I was,” he writes, “a fat kid trapped at the bottom of the masculinity chart.” His remarks about the Times, scattered throughout, range from grateful to caustic (he has only ill to say of Howell Raines). But he acknowledges some mentors, too, principally Gay Talese and Howard Cosell. He charts the vicissitudes of his relationships with some athletic legends, among them Muhammad Ali, Mickey Mantle (he praises Jane Leavy’s 2010 The Last Boy), Joe DiMaggio and Billy Jean King. However, Lipsyte doesn’t focus entirely on athletic celebrities. He provides sections on lacrosse players on the New York Onondaga Indian reservation and on Gerard Papa (a youth-basketball pioneer), and he talks about two huge stories he started, then abandoned for various reasons: the drug investigations that became the story behind The French Connection and the life of David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam” murderer). The author also tells about his experiences with NASCAR and cycling, and he writes sensitively about women in sports and about the emergence of openly gay athletes. He reserves his harshest criticism for his sports-writing colleagues, many of whom he views as little more than dim cheerleaders. Though frank about his struggles with cancer, Lipsyte bobs and weaves about other aspects of his personal life (three marriages ended for reasons unrevealed) and ends with a moving tribute to his late father. At times a bit detached for a memoir, but packed with bright, biting insights about America’s obsessions with athletics.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-176913-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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