Lengthy, solid, revealing biography of the owner of the L.A. Raiders—and a knowledgeable history of football's evolution from the Sixties onward, on and off the field. Portrayed by Ribowsky (He's a Rebel, 1988) as a pretend- athlete who never made the teams but tenaciously sought the company of real jocks, Davis, through his blue-collar Raiders (``oddities and irregulars, factory seconds and seeming chain gang escapees'') became an outlaw force in football. Ribowsky covers Davis's story thoroughly, especially the 1982 battle with Commissioner Pete Rozelle over Davis's right to move the team from Oakland to L.A. Leading up to that, Ribowsky details the peculiarly nasty Raider style that developed as Davis welded hard-case nonconformists into victorious Super Bowl teams, and also delivers a lively account of the bombs-away style that has unnerved Raider opponents. Davis emerges as chutzpah incarnate in his independent rise from a well-to-do Jewish background to successful coach to preeminence in the sport. Here, as the driven, indefatigable Raider-mensch scouts for his psychopath berserkers, he guts business opponents along the way without mercy, retaining a cadre of loyalists in a sea of enemies. But Davis's relationships with his players, blacks included, have been as close as can be found in the sport. Doused after a victory, ``[Davis] wore the wet clothes all the way home,'' giggles one player. The enemies list is long, though, once headed by former Raiders-owner Wayne Valley, who gave Davis his biggest breaks: At Valley's funeral, ``The police were watching for him,'' says wife Gladys Valley. ``They had orders to throw him out.'' ``You don't want Al Davis mad at you,'' says Gene Upshaw, and Ribowsky's sometimes clunky sentences do not obscure his forceful underscoring of that message. (Two eight-page photo inserts—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-602500-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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
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
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