An entertaining and important look at an often unexamined page in sports history.
Variety film critic McCarthy (Howard Hawks, 1997) highlights women’s roles in the annals of automobile racing.
Formula 1 fans and NASCAR aficionados, as well as those for whom Danica Patrick opened up the world of auto racing, might be shocked to learn that a number of women figured prominently in the sport from its late-19th-century infancy. The heyday for women racers in the U.S., notes the author, came during the 1950s, that notoriously celebrated decade of domesticity. Particularly the years 1953 through 1958 marked what McCarthy calls “a privileged moment in the grand sweep of American automobile racing, a small window of time when the sport was accessible to virtually anyone with a desire to pursue it; if you had a car and were good enough, you could drive it to a track and race. Women included.” While McCarthy spotlights the gossip column–like lives and impressive achievements of Evelyn Mull, Denise McCluggage, Ruth Levy and Mary Davis—all gifted racers of the period—he also frames their triumphs within the broader context of other groundbreaking or just sensational events for women and the car in general. One such moment occurred in June 1909, when Alice Ramsey, a 22-year-old mother from Hackensack, departed New York City in her $1,500 windowless, gas gauge–less, four-cylinder, 30-horsepower Maxwell DA and became the first woman to drive across the continent, arriving in San Francisco almost two months later. Another took place in 1934, when Elfreida Mais decided to attempt a different sort of record by driving her car through a burning wall packed with dynamite; needless to say, this automotive first proved to be her last act. Though somewhat disjointed, McCarthy’s vividly episodic account runs the gamut from behind-the-scenes partying to the fascinating variety of records women attempted, representing not only the obvious tests of speed and distance, but also those of physical endurance.
An entertaining and important look at an often unexamined page in sports history.Pub Date: May 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4013-5202-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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