Greenberg’s morning show will never sound the same when fans consider that he has already fielded his wife’s sleepy plaints,...
A pleasing slice of radio sportscaster Greenberg’s life, giving an inkling of how he squares his family priorities with the absurd demands of his job.
When his psychiatrist reassured him that he was not too self-centered to be a father and would surely put his children before his job as host of a popular morning sports-radio show, Greenberg demurred: “Sometimes you don’t put the really important things first. I should know; I talk about sports for a living.” Yet Greenberg, who inherited his obsession with sports from his parents (“I love that [my mother] would have left my father for Joe Namath in a heartbeat, and that he would have applauded her for it,” he reveals) writes with sweet musicality about the wonderful, trying presences of his son and daughter, joking about their urgencies as if he were a high-school prankster. His worldview combines the tenderness of a dad with a sporting man’s vision of harmony; he finds it hard to understand why the world’s war-makers haven’t figured out that at the end of the day combatants should be able to get up, dust off, grab a shower and share a beer. Simplistic? Of course, but it’s still refreshing. “You forgive,” he writes. “It’s what separates us from the animals.” The everyday nonsense of his extended family brings clarity to the exquisite play on the field. Thrill to it while you can, for life is short—except on those nights when a child cries on and on.
Greenberg’s morning show will never sound the same when fans consider that he has already fielded his wife’s sleepy plaints, his aunt’s queries about gambling and his children’s appeal for a warm caress, all before they tuned in to the station.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6438-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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