A refreshing sports biography that punctures common myths about one of baseball’s greats.
A new biography of Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Ernie Banks (1931-2015).
Sports journalist Rapoport (The Immortal Bobby: Bobby Jones and the Golden Age of Golf, 2005, etc.), who wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than two decades, began his project as a collaborator with the baseball legend; however, after Banks died, the author decided to transform the intended autobiography into a biography. Banks is best known for his sterling play as a power-hitting shortstop, his nearly 20-year career with the hapless Chicago Cubs, and his eternally cheery outlook on baseball and life. Rapoport does not debunk the essential truths of those surface qualities, but he offers copious evidence that Banks was more complicated than most baseball fans know. Banks grew up as one of 12 children in Dallas, in a time of cruel racial segregation. Until he entered the Army in 1951 (he served in Germany during the Korean War) and then broke the color barrier on the Cubs two years later, he had no meaningful contact with open racism, leaving him deeply naïve about what he would face throughout his life. Intellectually curious and self-effacing, Banks may have lost his naiveté about racism, but he chose to avoid the crusader label. As a result, he faced a lifetime of puzzlement and occasional criticism for his refusal to speak out against segregation, especially from Chicagoans appalled by the virulent racism infecting the city. In his family life, Banks’ sunny disposition hid his eventual alienation from his parents, siblings, wives, and children. Despite the author’s periodic coverage of social issues, he devotes the bulk of the biography to baseball on the field and in the clubhouse. Dedicated baseball fans will appreciate Rapoport’s coverage of dozens of Cubs players, field managers, and executives, including the complicated Wrigley family owners. One of the book’s shortcomings is the author’s attempts to cram in too much information about seven decades of baseball, but that’s a minor quibble.
A refreshing sports biography that punctures common myths about one of baseball’s greats.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31863-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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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