An enjoyable book about golf for golfers who play the game and enjoy reading about its history.
An insider chronicles the career of the great golfer.
Veteran sports reporter Callahan (His Father’s Son: Earl and Tiger Woods, 2010, etc.) has wanted to write a book like this for a long time. He’s a die-hard Arnold Palmer (1929-2016) fan and has tremendous admiration for Palmer’s “considerate heart.” He describes his subject as “equal parts humble and proud…equal parts commoner and king.” He interviewed Palmer many times and has had countless conversations with players about him. Callahan begins in 1960 because “Palmer didn’t formally become Palmer until the 1960 U.S. Open,” which he won in dramatic fashion. He won eight more times that year, including the Masters. The author traces Palmer’s career chronologically by key years. “1929” briefly covers his early years and the immense influence his father had on him and his game. He discusses Palmer’s amateur wins in chapters “1950” and “1954.” Then came “1955” and his first professional win, the Canadian Open. It was followed by 61 more PGA wins and countless others. Callahan goes into great detail describing key shots and the clubs used and pressure-filled shots he had to pull off to win a tournament. Along the way, he provides fascinating miniprofiles of lesser-known players—e.g., Don Cherry and Tommy Bolt—and discusses the competitive “vinegar” that often spilled out between Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Callahan’s lively and brisk writing style makes for an eminently readable book jam-packed with anecdotes and stories golfers will love—as well as nice tidbits, like how players used to pool purses among themselves, a “common but secret practice then.” Callahan provides a special section of personal comments from a wide variety of people who knew and loved Palmer, as well as some 80 pages of lists—tournaments and matches won, scores, earnings, statues and even streets named after Palmer.
An enjoyable book about golf for golfers who play the game and enjoy reading about its history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243972-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
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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