Another work of Boston sports hagiography from one of the jock beat's leading home teamers. For nearly 40 years, Arnold ``Red'' Auerbach ran the show, trademark cigar in hand, for the emerald-clad Boston Celtics. Serving as coach from 1950 to 1966, then as general manager and unopposed despot until 1990 or so (he is still on the payroll as a consultant), Red guided the Hub's beloved Jolly Green Giants to 16 NBA championships, including an amazing streak of titles running from 195966. So successful was the team that Auerbach's effective coaching and astute talent assessment—he acquired many of the game's greatest players, including Bob Cousy, Bill Russell, John Havlicek, and Larry Bird (who wrote the book's foreword)—were dismissed by foes as ``The Celtics Mystique.'' During Red's time at the top, the NBA grew from a barnstorming curiosity to a multi- billion-dollar global enterprise, and it would be hard to overstate his influence on the game—but Shaughnessy (The Curse of the Bambino, 1990) very nearly succeeds. While he does show Auerbach's cantankerous and occasionally pig-headed side, the author essentially presents to readers little more than a mash note loaded with anecdotes about Red's cigar-chompin', ref-baitin', hell- drivin' virtuosity. Not merely a great x's and o's guy (the NBA annually presents the Red Auerbach award to its outstanding coach), he is in Shaughnessy's presentation basketball's Moses, the man who led the game out of darkness. Non-Celtics fans might want to skim many passages to get to the parts where Red sagely catalogues the game's changes—for example, his observation that ballplayers ``used to come to practice with gym bags; now they come with attachÇ cases.'' At 77, Red has slowed a bit: He's no longer the preeminent judge of talent, and he's down to two or three stogies a day. But as long as guys like Shaughnessy can hold a pen, it's always Red's game; anyone else just came to play. (8 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59680-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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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