An astonishing story of accomplishment that would have been invigorated by more lively, animated prose.
An in-depth, inside look at the legendary golfer’s historic 1997 Masters win.
Besides reliving his eventful week at Augusta National as a much-hyped 21-year-old, the usually secretive Woods (How I Play Golf, 2001), with co-author Rubenstein, reveals a great deal about himself, his family, his coaches, and his thinking as he prepared to hit key shots during his four, pressure-filled championship rounds. Thanks to prestigious amateur wins prior to 1997, Woods had already played in the tournament twice. He recounts playing practice rounds with past Masters winners like Nick Faldo, Fred Couples, and Raymond Floyd, during which he consistently asked questions about how to play the course. They provided valuable advice, especially regarding how to negotiate the course’s treacherous greens using the old balata golf ball. Woods also realized that he would need to be able to swing at less than full speed, hit the ball down, and take spin off it when needed. He then goes into great detail describing his three practice days before the tournament started, working on specific shots, understanding where to place tee shots, dealing with the media, and playing in the delightful par-3 tournament. When Thursday’s play arrived, Woods was shocked: “I would never have realized that I would shoot 40 on the front nine of the first round.” His back swing had gotten too long. Just before starting the back nine, Fluff Cowan, his caddie, helped calm him down. Woods shot 30 on the back nine, two under for the day. His final winning score of 270 and his margin of victory—12 strokes—were new tournament records. The author’s meticulous recounting of those next three days—the shots hit, the challenges met, the emotions felt—provides a rare perspective of golf played at the highest level.
An astonishing story of accomplishment that would have been invigorated by more lively, animated prose.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4358-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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