Despite an occasional overload of detail, this is a provocative look at the world of games and the way the mind works with...
From Wall Street Journal sports reporter and NPR commentator Fatsis (Wild and Outside, 1998), a comprehensive guide to the world of competitive Scrabble.
Fatsis used to play a pretty mean game of Scrabble—or so he thought, until he began investigating the game for an article and found himself becoming nearly as obsessed as the hard-core players he interviewed: G.I. (as in gastrointestinal) Joel Sherman, the pill-popping comedian Matt Graham, and Marlon Hill, an ardent young black nationalist. They all spent their lives learning new words and playing in tournaments to win the prizes that were their only income. Some loved words for themselves, others merely as means to an ends—and Fatsis advises anyone thinking of playing competitive Scrabble to face the reality “that the game requires learning words that may not have any outside utility.” Ultimately, competitive Scrabble is “about mastering the rules of the game, and the words are the rules.” The author takes lessons from the champions, plays at competitions, and learns about bingos (using all seven tiles at once), alphagrams (rearranging the letters of words in alphabetical order), and coffeehousing (unnerving your competitor by talking during a tournament). While working on improving his ratings as he competes from Manhattan to Reno, he also researches the history of the game. Invented by an unemployed architect named Alfred Butts during the Depression, Scrabble did not catch on until the 1950s, when increased leisure led to sales of over three million sets in the US and abroad. Competitive Scrabble, Fatsis concludes, attracted him because it allowed him to deal with old issues straight off a therapist’s couch (i.e., control, order, power), as well as giving him a new way to meet friends, pass time, and make a name for himself (i.e., a hobby).
Despite an occasional overload of detail, this is a provocative look at the world of games and the way the mind works with words.Pub Date: July 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-01584-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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