Well-intended but best read by 60-something fans of Boston ball.
Hit the quarterback. Hit the mook. This tale of crime and penalty focuses on a local antihero who did plenty of both.
Kelly, a member of the conference-winning Saint Don Bosco Technical High School team of 1974, tells two stories. The first is a fairly ordinary football memoir: the team owes it all to God and coach, and it’s made up of stock types such as “the guy who always talked the talk because he knew he could back up every word” and the boy who, “easy to talk to…is quiet, intelligent, and dependable.” In this case, the coach, Jack Clyde Dempsey, was an upstanding fellow who had an unusually sophisticated way of reading the field and the stances of the opposing players: “The offensive lineman knows when the ball is being hiked,” he says. “You don’t. Picking up on these clues helps you to neutralize his advantage.” Pop Warner or pro, a player can learn a thing or two from Kelly’s pages when Dempsey talks. There are fine turns in this aspect of the book, as Kelly reveals the scarifying effect of his mother’s suicide and the grit required of a kid growing up motherless and Catholic on the edge of a very bad neighborhood. Less successful is the second story, built on the revelation, mired in mounds of cliché, that Dempsey later moved on to being a hit man for hire, eventually a fugitive and a fixture on the FBI wanted list. There’s not much drama in what ought to be a tense, frightening situation, and the best words here again belong to the now coked-up yet eminently reasonable Dempsey and not the author: “If I hurt someone right away, then we’ll never get our money,” he explains. “But if I’m coming to visit someone three, four times, and they haven’t made a payment, well…things might get a little rough.”
Well-intended but best read by 60-something fans of Boston ball.Pub Date: July 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61088-169-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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