A mildly interesting though dubious, discursive account of one of modern golf’s pioneers.
The story of J. Douglas Edgar (1884–1921), inventor of the modern golf swing and a rising star before his untimely death, the victim of what newspaper heir Comer Howell and others believed was murder.
Edgar was found bleeding in an Atlanta street and died moments later. Eubanks (Golf Freek: One Man’s Quest to Play As Many Rounds of Golf As Possible. For Free., 2007, etc.) tells how Howell and some co-workers came upon the dying golfer and how, despite some odd circumstances surrounding his death, many people quickly concluded that Edgar was the victim of a hit-and-run auto accident. The book then alternates between an account of Howell’s involvement in the unfolding investigation of Edgar’s death and the story of Edgar’s life, from his early struggles in golf to his rise to prominence after inventing “the movement” that is considered the modern golf swing. Armed with archival material, family lore and notes from a veteran reporter friend who wrote about Edgar 40 years ago, Eubanks creates highly detailed scenes of his two protagonists’ lives. After some erratic performances on the course, writes the author, Edgar said to his assistant, “let’s gan straight up to me room an’ you can have a look at the way I’m swingin’ the cloob. It seems every bloody iron shot’s gannin left o’ the green.” The invented dialogue often makes the narrative read like a novel. Though the author notes that he relied on diaries, letters and transcripts when possible, and on family history elsewhere, he admits that “how accurate those conversations are after ninety years of retelling is anybody’s guess.” Readers who can tolerate periodic detours into tangential topics like World War I and Howell family history may find the book diverting on a rainy afternoon.
A mildly interesting though dubious, discursive account of one of modern golf’s pioneers.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-51081-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: ESPN Books/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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