How baseball turns boys into men, and vice versa, considered with feeling and a bittersweet edge.
Baseball maven Stanton’s sentimental The Final Season (2000) earned him an invitation to speak during induction week at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here, he recounts that event—and a lot more.
It was in 1972 that 11-year-old Tom first began badgering his father to take him and older brother Joey to Cooperstown, New York, because “our team,” the Detroit Tigers, was in a dogfight for the American League pennant. The recurrence of their mother’s brain tumor and subsequent surgery, however, put the trip off indefinitely. After that, Stanton recalls, “We were always going to go there sometime, but the sometimes ran out.” Some 29 years later, however, Tom gets the call and invites Dad—now in his 80s but still capable of reciting entire genealogies of Tiger players—to drive out from Michigan along with Joey. The journey begins and ends with random but vivid flashbacks triggered by each Stanton in turn, as Cooperstown becomes an allegory for anticipation. Baseball is the theme, of course, but the author uses affinity for the game as a matrix for probing the male bond, belatedly comprehending the vast depth of parental love, examining the roots of pride and accomplishment, and even expiating (then resurrecting) sibling rivalry. As they tour Cooperstown’s museum, nostalgia and myth bubble up, interweave, and are sometimes amended: Babe Ruth, it turns out, was not an orphan; Abner Doubleday was away at West Point around the time the game was perfected; Ty Cobb actually wore sheepskin sliding pads! Homeward bound, the Stantons’ constant gentle banter on who best remembers what really happened eventually subsides into tacit realization that this, their first-ever overnight trip together, is also their last.
How baseball turns boys into men, and vice versa, considered with feeling and a bittersweet edge.Pub Date: June 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30350-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
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