Simon and Garfunkel famously asked, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Clavin reminds readers that Joe is not the only...
A fine biography of the greatest brother combination ever to play major league baseball.
Vincent, Joe and Dominic DiMaggio lived out the American dream. Three brothers of 11 children born to Italian immigrants, the three boys excelled first in the Pacific Coast League for the local San Francisco Seals and then, one-by-one, they rose to play in the major leagues. Vince, the eldest of the three, broke his father’s prohibition against wasting time with games and thus paved the way for his brothers. Joe, the middle of the three, was the legend who married movie stars but was also cold and distant. Dominic, the bespectacled youngest and smallest of the trio, was a star in his own right but lived in the shadow of Joe. The journeyman Vince had the most trouble adjusting to post-baseball life and struggled just to make ends meet. Joe continued to be reticent and reserved, never recovering from his star-crossed marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and effectively made a career out of being Joe DiMaggio, legend. Dominick meanwhile, had the most grounded and, in many ways, successful post-baseball career, using his intellect to become a successful businessman. A fourth West Coast native, Ted Williams, plays almost as much of a role in the book as the brothers DiMaggio. He and teammate Dominic continued to be close for the remainder of their lives, with Williams always maintaining that Dominic belonged in the Hall of Fame. Clavin clearly agrees, and it is a strength of this evocative book that while Joe remains the legend, Dominic comes across as the most admirable DiMaggio in the end.
Simon and Garfunkel famously asked, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Clavin reminds readers that Joe is not the only DiMaggio worth remembering.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218377-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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