Likable, well-told autobiography of the world's greatest pocket billiards player, full of superb billiard lore and tales of giants of the cue. Even those who have never played pool will enjoy this engaging story of a Philadelphia billiards prodigy who was playing for stakes at age six and who, a year later, challenged (but lost to) then-World Champion Ralph Greenleaf. Mosconi (writing here with Cohen, A Magic Summer, 1988, etc.) heard billiard balls clicking in earliest childhood, the sound coming from tables in his father's pool hall below the boy's bedroom, and at age five began playing while standing on a box. Though his father tried to deny him access to the tables, Mosconi unveiled a talent so great that his stunned dad began showing the kid off in matches at his and other pool halls. At age seven, Mosconi defeated ten-year-old Juvenile Champion Ruth McGinnis, and, when he turned ten himself, retired undefeated. When the Depression hit, Mosconi reentered the sport for prize money, soon learning that tournament masters had an analytic sense of the game far superior to that of pool hustlers out to con inferior players. Mosconi himself never hustled—though, as a joke, Toots Shor once brought him in to beat braggart Jackie Gleason, who didn't know Mosconi by sight. The author commended Gleason to director Robert Rossen to play Minnesota Fats in The Hustler, for which Mosconi acted as technical adviser and as Paul Newman's trainer. Many legendary games are replayed here as Mosconi shows—quite modestly—how his fast, nervous style won the World Championship 15 times and at last crushed the real-life Minnesota Fats on TV's Wide World of Sports. You're on the green felt, kissing a solid-colored ball into a side pocket and stopping on a dime, positioned perfectly for the next ball. Marvelous. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-587495-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
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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