An account of the charmed life of New York Yankee icon Derek Jeter that’s as short on salacious revelations as it is long on adulation.
If Jeter’s life hasn’t been perfect, it’s come pretty close. Notwithstanding some troubling childhood encounters with racism, the handsome, charismatic, biracial Jeter managed to combine the hardworking mindset of his grandfather with the loving positivity of his parents to turn himself into the best baseball prospect—not to mention the biggest Yankees fan—ever to emerge from Kalamazoo, Mich. After being drafted by those same Yankees, the highly touted prospect shot through the minor league ranks and went on to win rookie of the year in Major Leagues, an honor that would presage bigger things to come. ESPNNewYork.com writer O’Connor (Arnie and Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf’s Greatest Rivalry, 2009) ably chronicles that rise and those bigger things, including five World Series titles to date, as well as the astonishing list of A-list starlets Jeter dated along the way (while miraculously minimizing his tabloid presence), and his strange relationship with superstar rival/teammate Alex Rodriguez. Though Jeter’s cooperation was limited to a few locker-room interviews, it quickly becomes apparent how much the author reveres his subject, a man whose on-field talent is apparently matched by his off-field integrity, impish sense of humor and ability to charm children. The only real dirt O’Connor can dig up is Jeter’s inability to forgive those who slight him, no matter how innocuously, and even that revelation reads like a well-qualified job candidate’s rehearsed response to the standard interview question about one’s greatest weakness. Still, there’s something refreshing about an icon who actually lives up to his billing as a nice guy, hard worker and great teammate, even if it seems odd to tell his story while it’s still unfolding. Not unlike the Captain’s public persona—polished and well put together, but a bit bland.
Pub Date: May 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-32793-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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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