Plenty of baseball for the fan, but even more insight into why Aaron matters beyond the game.
An eye-opening biography of the Braves’ outfielder, the real home-run king.
Though he retired as the all-time leader in RBIs and total bases, Henry Aaron was “never supposed to be the guy” who ran down the game’s most cherished record: Babe Ruth’s career 714 home runs. Known for his durability and his amazingly strong wrists, which allowed him to wait until the last millisecond on a pitch, the never-flashy Aaron remains, if there can be such a thing, an underrated superstar. ESPN senior writer Bryant (Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, 2005, etc.) attributes this oversight to Aaron’s background and demeanor, to a press insistent on its own agenda and blithely unaware of its prejudice and to the frightful mental and spiritual toll exacted from this black man from the South as he overtook the Babe. The author pays close attention to Aaron’s baseball career, from the early days through to his curtain call as a designated hitter for the Brewers. If we never come to know the introverted Aaron, Bryant allows us, at least, to understand him, keenly evoking the social environments that shaped the man. Although sportswriters frequently compared him to Willie Mays—with whom he seems to have had a somewhat peevish relationship—the non-confrontational, quiet, poorly educated Aaron ached to emulate Jackie Robinson and wanted desperately to be recognized for more than merely “hate mail and home runs.” Applying the single-mindedness that made him such a great player, Aaron reached the Braves’ front office—the first black ex-major-leaguer making decisions for the home club—and enjoyed business success selling cars. Baseball’s tainted steroid era has, if anything, bestowed an even brighter shine to Aaron’s on-field achievements, but Bryant makes clear that this slugger’s story was always about more than merely overcoming blazing fastballs.
Plenty of baseball for the fan, but even more insight into why Aaron matters beyond the game.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-42485-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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