As frothy as a ballpark beer.
Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day—a celebration of the many men (and one woman) of Irish descent who have densely populated professional baseball, especially in its earliest decades.
FoxSports.com analyst Rosen (Bullpen Diaries: Mariano Rivera, Bronx Dreams, Pinstripe Legends, and the Future of the New York Yankees, 2011, etc.) has nothing too weighty on his mind here. The text is full of bullet points, lots of anecdotes and earnestness mixed with facetiousness. The author begins with a snapshot of the game in 1894, a game that in some ways resembled today’s, in other ways was nearly alien (pitchers had to keep both feet on the ground but could doctor the ball with just about any substance). He writes about the socioeconomic factors that brought so many Irish immigrants to American shores and notes how they found baseball one of the few places that (grudgingly) accepted rather than excluded them. By the 1880s about 40 percent of players were Irish. The author leaps back to the 1870s and the first professional league, then advances decade by decade to the present. Some famous names from diamond (and cultural) history emerge along the way—the evangelist Billy Sunday gave the game a whirl, and was slugger Mike “King” Kelly the source for “Casey at the Bat”? By the 1890s some future deities on baseball’s Olympus had appeared, John McGraw, Connie Mack and Charles Comiskey among them. As the decades proceeded, the Irish influence waxed and waned and waxed again, and the author includes a number of interviews—oddly dull ones for the most part—with current players with Irish ancestry. Readers will no doubt enjoy the stories (most are quite brief) about the likes of Billy O’Hara (an outfielder who improved the techniques of throwing hand grenades), Joe McCarthy, Casey Stengel, umpire Jocko Conlan, Denny McClain and myriad others.
As frothy as a ballpark beer.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208988-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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