Mets fans in particular will enjoy this wholly unique perspective on one of their fondest memories.
As we approach the 30th anniversary, a former All-Star pitcher, now broadcaster, reflects on the last game of the historic 1986 World Series.
Remember Vin Scully’s famous 10th inning call about Mookie Wilson’s little dribbler along first? Rolling “behind the bag!...it gets through Buckner!...here comes Knight!...and the Mets win it!” Even hard-core fans sometimes forget the New York Mets needed a seventh game to seal the series victory over the Boston Red Sox, a contest Darling (The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, 2009) left after three innings, having put his team in a three-run hole. With an assist from Paisner, Darling revisits this “bittersweet” moment of personal failure and team success. During the course of his inning-by-inning treatment, the author analyzes the reasons for his collapse: hoping simply to avoid embarrassment, leaving the door open to worry and fear, refusing to go earlier to his breaking ball. He poignantly recalls the “walk of shame” back to the dugout after failing to deliver in the big spot. He expands the narrative to explain the various meanings of the baseball “glove tap,” to deconstruct the pitcher-batter-catcher dynamic upon which the umpire sometimes intrudes, and to recall his blue-collar boyhood in Massachusetts. He focuses, though, on Game 7, assessing Boston stars like Jim Rice, Wade Boggs, Dwight Evans, schoolboy rival Rich Gedman, and opposing pitcher Bruce Hurst and commenting on notable teammates like Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dykstra, Doc Gooden, Gary Carter, and Darryl Strawberry. These Mets saw themselves as a team of destiny, brimming with the necessary talent, killer instinct, arrogance, and even a certain selfishness to claw back the game Darling had almost given away. These hard-partying ballplayers proved, in Darling’s words, “too young, too full of ourselves” to be great for more than one season, wasting their gifts and a very real chance at a dynasty. But in ’86, they were magic.
Mets fans in particular will enjoy this wholly unique perspective on one of their fondest memories.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06919-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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