An artful class portrait of a town seen through the lens of a game, a tight-throated personal journey back into youth, and a...
Writing part memoir, part chronicle of a high-school hockey season, journalist and novelist Atkinson (Caveman Politics, 1997) takes readers along on his emotional ride as assistant coach of the 1999–2000 Methuen Rangers.
Atkinson grew up in Methuen, a one-time working-class town in Massachusetts now undergoing gentrification. Here, he returns to his high-school alma mater, 25 years after he played goalie for the school team, to record the current season. Like the newsman he is, Atkinson keeps his writing of the moment, which works beautifully for this nonstop sport. Hockey is elemental to Methuen, a part of the town’s collective identity, corralling entire families to sustain the expenses and long hours demanded from Methuen’s still essentially working class team. But a parent could ask for no better coach than Joe Robillard—“We’re here to help the kids, plain and simple”—the kind of sportsman who understands that passions are born, not made out of a parent’s inflated expectations, that you must work hard for your dreams, but they have to be your dreams to begin with. As Robillard puts his team through their paces, Atkinson laces the narrative with his personal experiences with hockey—from the pure, near-ancestral, qualities of pond hockey, through his high-school days, to his current old-man’s league—and proud, big-hearted stories of his five-year-old son’s early hockey experiences. Atkinson has evocative power, whether it be in describing the olfactory insult of a hockey locker room, the ebullience that attends a sharply played game, the sound of skates, cutting over ice, echoing off a far hillside, remembering the dedication of his father and hoping he can measure himself by that standard, or detailing the tribulations of high-school life: parents with cancer, loser friends, making mistakes and making amends, and hormones, hormones, hormones.
An artful class portrait of a town seen through the lens of a game, a tight-throated personal journey back into youth, and a keen description of the life force that hockey can be.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60706-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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