A pleasing slice of baseball nostalgia that offers relevance to today’s game.
The history of a fascinating franchise during professional baseball’s colorful 1970s era.
Sports journalist Turbow (co-author: The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls—the Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, 2010) focuses on Charlie Finley (1918-1996), the owner of the Oakland Athletics franchise, and the key players on his flamboyant championship teams of the early 1970s. Finley, who earned his fortune in the insurance industry, never won acceptance in the club of wealthy, white male owners of Major League Baseball teams. He was irreverent about the rules and traditions of the game, and, perhaps as shocking to the baseball establishment, he openly exhibited his control-freak nature, narcissism, “hard-edged attitude,” illogical penny-pinching, and a host of other unpleasant traits. Despite his larger-than-life character, Finley often made wise decisions about corralling talented players for his rosters. For a few glory years, the players, many of a rebellious nature, meshed well on and off the field. (Turbow quotes pitcher Blue Moon Odom that to join Finley’s roster, “you have to pass the crazy test. You fill out that application—are you crazy? If the answer is no, we don’t want you.”) The narrative benefits immensely from Turbow’s many interviews with the long-retired players from the Athletics’ dominant stretch. A cast of characters section provides information about the post-baseball careers of the members of this particular dynasty, including such well-known names as Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers (Reggie Jackson: “We call him ‘buzzard’ because he’s off in his own world. Nothing bothers him. Him and that handlebar mustache of his—he’s cool”). The dismantling of the team by the mercurial and seemingly illogical Finley introduces a down note to this rollicking sports adventure. When Finley died at age 77, few people from professional baseball attended the funeral.
A pleasing slice of baseball nostalgia that offers relevance to today’s game.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-30317-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
