In lyrical and immediate prose (he employs the present tense throughout) Price describes a lovely, proud, impoverished...
A senior writer at Sports Illustrated presents an impressionistic analysis of the primacy of sports in Cuban culture.
In a volume that is as much cultural anthropology as sports writing, Price examines a Cuba that remains obsessed with the considerable achievements of its principal athletes despite pervasive poverty and increasing numbers of defectors who flee to the US in search of riches. Price visited the island many times and here assembles a pleasant patchwork that adheres only incidentally to chronology. Beginning with the March 1998 signing by the New York Yankees of Cuban phenom Orlando `El Duque` Hernandez (`the best pitcher in modern Cuban history`), Price then moves back and forth in time, attempting to discover why Cuba remains `one of the last places where athletes play for little more than love of the game.` Along the way he manages to interview some of Cuba’s greatest athletic heroes, including former Olympic standouts Teofilo Stevenson (boxing) and Alberto Juantorena (track), and baseball greats Lazaro Valle (a talented pitcher on the downside of his career) and Jose Ramon Cabrera (a first baseman who fell from grace in a Black Sox-like scandal). Among the most touching episodes are Price’s encounters with the Olympic middle-distance runner Ana Quirot, who, though disfigured in a kitchen fire in 1993, returned to win a silver medal in the 1996 Olympics. She has become such an inspiration to Cubans than some fans merely `touch her shoulders and start to cry.` But these are not traditional Q&A interviews. Price encounters athletes in the streets, meets them in restaurants, goes to their homes, bar-hops across Havana with them. He also explodes the persistent canard that Castro was a talented pitcher.
In lyrical and immediate prose (he employs the present tense throughout) Price describes a lovely, proud, impoverished people caught in repressive system that destroys thousands as it celebrates a handful.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-019660-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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