An even-handed, practical argument that athletes must be guided by decency and held accountable for their actions—and that...
A psychotherapist explores the by-products of fame that encourage athletes’ destructive behavior.
Like all humans, gifted sports players have inner demons; what interests Teitelbaum are the special circumstances that prompt athletes’ loss of perspective and poise. First, he takes a look at why they have been granted wealth and adulation. One cause, Teitelbaum suggests, is the fans’ need for heroes: We are moved and inspired by greatness, and we enhance our self-image by imagining an association with sports stars. They give us a sense of involvement, connection and purposefulness, a romantic yet observable feeling that life can be fantastic. Not to be forgotten, the media’s fawning over athletes taps into a celebrity culture that makes a lot of money for a number of people, from team owners and sportscasters to the sportswear and endorsement industries, never mind the players. Yet Teitelbaum writes persuasively that sports stars have much to answer for, giving hundreds of examples of gambling, substance abuse, sexual assault and even murder. These are the products, he argues, of terminal adolescence, a distorted sense of entitlement, an attitude of omnipotence and invulnerability allowing athletes to reside outside the rules that govern daily life. This attitude in part reflects the violence and moral erosion of society at large, but it also stems from immaturity characterized by a lack of empathy and self-control. Teitelbaum is well aware that emotional frailty often underlies athletes’ physical prowess: Many come from upbringings marred by domestic violence on the one hand and overindulgence on the other, he notes, though there are also many well-adjusted sports stars. When is the front office going to come out of denial? the author asks. “The leagues,” he says, “need to do a better job of policing themselves and withstanding the pressure to be lenient towards those superstars who cross the line.”
An even-handed, practical argument that athletes must be guided by decency and held accountable for their actions—and that fans need to get a life, or at least a dose of reality.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2005
ISBN: 0-8032-4445-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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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