Readers hoping for a revealing insider’s account in the vein of George Plimpton’s Paper Lion will be disappointed.
Sportswriter Kluck (Facing Tyson, 2006) offers a superficial chronicle of his experiences in pro football’s minor leagues.
After a two-year semi-pro career that ended with a broken collarbone in 2001, the author decided at the advanced age of 30 to attempt one last hurrah by signing on with a minor league team: the Battle Creek Crunch of the Great Lakes Indoor Football League. Unfortunately, Kluck proves less interested in the hidden facets of professional football’s lower rungs than in the sport’s more mundane aspects. He describes in detail boring bus rides to the games, violent collisions on the field and hours of pure athleticism in the weight room, which he finds tremendously rewarding. He never refers to disagreements or conflicts among players, never suggests that any of his teammates might use performance-enhancing drugs, rarely gives any glimpse into the nonprofessional lives of his teammates. An opportunity for drama arises when Battle Creek Crunch owner Mike Powell abandons his financial responsibilities and allows the league to take over his team. The author arranges a meeting with Powell, who lied to his players, refused to pay their salaries and even stopped paying into their insurance plan. Yet Kluck refrains from any kind of confrontation, meekly listening as Powell provides excuses for his conduct and never asking the hard questions readers expect from a journalist—or a disgruntled employee, for that matter. Knowing they will probably never be paid, the players slog on and make it to the playoffs despite a losing record. But their willingness to continue seems to reflect apathy more than competitive fire.
Readers hoping for a revealing insider’s account in the vein of George Plimpton’s Paper Lion will be disappointed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59921-043-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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