Whatever Callahan is driving at here, it remains a mystery.
Golf Digest columnist Callahan takes an unfocused dip into the world of professional golf, intending to use Tiger Woods as his lodestone.
His narrative, however, is too unbridled to have a central character. Nothing original will be gleaned from these pages as pertains to Woods, who continues to be a pleasant and graceful cipher. Callahan’s report that Tiger is a naturally gifted golfer who works hard at his game to achieve a thrilling level of control over the ball is not late-breaking news. Woods’s coach, Butch Harmon, may say, “Golf’s a fickle game . . . even the great ones find it, lose it, find it again, lose it again,” but Woods has pretty much found and held his game. Callahan tries to get some mileage out of the father-son theme that has developed of late among golfers—Tiger and his dad, the Duvals, the Harmons, the Nicklauses, the not-so-recent Morrises, even Michael and James Jordan make it into the picture—but this doesn’t really lead anywhere other than some mildly interesting human-interest material. Mostly noticeable here are the qualities Woods doesn’t have. He lacks a sense of humor, at least in public; while Jasper Parnevik has the wit to say that golf is “a very strange game to have as a job,” Woods bristles that “second sucks, and third is worse.” He’ll never make it into golf’s long line of endearing eccentrics like John Daly (of whom Callahan remarks, “Though John thought [his fiancée] was twenty-nine and single, she was actually thirty-nine and married. This represented a pretty good capsule of his grasp on things”). And in dealing with Augusta National’s moronic traditions, Wood could use some of the ethical mettle Lee Trevino displayed in the 1970s. Highlighting the golfer’s faults is clearly unintentional, since Callahan is obviously a fan, but it’s typical of the author’s failure to control his material.
Whatever Callahan is driving at here, it remains a mystery.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-60943-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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