The following review is from your WebMaster...
Tin Cup Dreams - A Long Shot Makes it on the PGA Tour.
So, you thought all golf pros grew up on the country club?
They all went to fancy colleges on golf Scholarships?
Ok, most of them did. But here's a story about Mexican
Esteban Toledo who makes it on tour the hard way.
This book is a good look at not only what it takes to get a PGA Tour
card, but to keep the card! A good read for all the family golfers!
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The following reviews are from Mike.
Second Opinions,
Jerome Groopman, M.D., Viking, published by the Penguin Group, 2000, 243 pages.
This is the second book written by Dr. Groopman in the last four years. In 1997, Groopman authored his first book, The Measure of Our Days. Both of these books are rare finds in our society.
Dr. Groopman brings to the writing the unique synthesis of three skills and gifts that mark him as a terribly talented individual. Dr. Groopman is the Recanti Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a leading researcher in cancer and AIDS. He has written many articles as a contributor to The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and numerous other publications.
Apart from being an expert in the field of immunology and cancer research, Groopman writes with the literary skills of a prize-winning novelist. His ability to absorb the reader into the narrative is extraordinary. His use of technical detail to explain the story is not blinding to the layman but lucid, as any reader will attest.
Finally, Dr. Groopman writes from his heart with considerable sensitivity to the patients whom he treats and the people with whom he works professionally. His background in the Jewish faith serve to authenticate his marvel at the creative world around him in which he, as a medical professional, is challenged to be a resource for others.
These two books describe case stories of ordinary people who have come to Dr. Groopman for his immense expertise. What makes the reading so significant is his unrelenting search for the truth in what he finds for a diagnosis and concomitant prognosis.
His writing is truly at the highest level. I can only recommend this book with all my heart.
Limbo
A Memoir
A. Manette Ansay
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
New York, 2001, 269 pages, ISBN 0-688-17286-5
This is an autobiography of immense value and charm. Ansay writes of her early years in life seeking clarity to the future and explicates for the reader the immense struggle she encountered with a disabling physical condition that changed the whole context of her life.
Ansay sought a musical career as a classical pianist. She began this effort at an early age, playing short simple pieces, graduating to more complicated compositions, and seeking year after year the best teachers the family could find and afford. She practiced hours after hours with the zeal and intensity that many athletes bring to their endeavors. At times, she finished her practice sessions with aching forearms and limp hands. She carried on with even more intensity.
After high school, she entered a renowned conservatory to begin the serious business of studying for the degree and career she sought. Then, her life changed. The pain was now an ordinary part of her life. But, more critically, she began to lose her stamina and physical control. Her body failed her.
Essentially, the book uncovers the whole evolution of her dreams for success and the unpredicted path her life would take.
Ansay writes with the rhetorical skill that reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Her thought patterns are reminiscent of a philosopher of the likes of Blaise Pascal or Immanuel Kant.
She brings light to her world of darkness and will inspire each of us to pursue greater dreams than any of us might imagine.
Her expression of limbo, not the usual spiritual definition, is a masterpiece of thought and imagery.
Relax with this book and be charmed and edified and energized.
Left back: A Century of Failed School Reforms
Diane Ravitch
Simon &Schuster, New York, NY, 2000
555 Pages
Each of us has an opinion about education and the purpose and objective of schools, whether we look at public, private, or home schooling. We are all products of some particular educational system and philosophy and, as such, we bring to the opinion arena our own anecdotal evidence and singular feelings. The observations we make about the state of education in our contemporary experience reflect our own experience and our expectations.
But, how has the present system of education in America evolved into the complex array of public schools, private schools, home schooling, and alternative educational enterprises? What is new and what is not new? How do we define tradition and basic or classical instruction?
Who were and are the champions of the evolving disciplines that have been introduced into the history of education in America? Can we understand the late 20th century push for ‘reform’ without an appreciation for the ‘reform’ practitioners of the late 19th century?
When did the struggle begin between those who advocated an academic curriculum and those who advocated a ‘child centered’ curriculum? When did the curriculum reflect ‘English Language Arts’ in lieu of ‘English’?
Diane Ravitch has written a very informative and introspective book that provides an historical account of public educational theory and movements and people from the 19th century to the present. This book is comprehensive and detailed. And, the book provides an accounting of trends, standards, philosophies, social reforms, and testing arguments.
Ravitch makes this point in her introduction: “ … We cannot understand where we are and where we are heading without knowing where we have been. We live now with decisions and policies that were made long ago. Before we attempt to reform present practices, we must try to learn why those decisions were made and to understand the consequences of past policies. …” (p. 14)
Finally, Ravitch concludes her treatise with a simple statement of her own. “ …To be effective, schools must concentrate on their fundamental mission of teaching and learning. And they must do it for all children…” (p. 467)
This is a very valuable book to be read, digested, and put alongside your favorite dictionary.
Tip O’Neill and the Democratic Century - John Aloysius Farrell
Little, Brown and Company, Boston 2001 776 pages
Here is a biography of a beloved son of Massachusetts politics and the exemplar of the belief that government is necessary for the well being of society. Farrell is an editor for the Boston Globe and has produced a highly detailed biography of Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill, congressman and Speaker of the House.
Yet, it is even more than a biography. Farrell has provided a rhetorical sketch of Tip O’Neill, and his family and philosophy and the events in American politics from post WWI to 1994. With O’Neill as the focus, Farrell consciously examines the politics of America with the sense that Democrats were ‘the good guys’. The reader needs to be aware of the objective in the book, not overtly stated but rather clear, that O’Neill was a hero struggling against the tide of conservatism and the Republican power in Washington.
Farrell is a journalist and his writing is of that genre. The telling of history requires more than journalistic reporting. Insight and analysis are not the skills that Farrell brings to the writing.
But, this is a book to be read carefully. For those like myself who lived through the history, the books reminds us of those times and the characters involved. For the younger set, the book will edify and inform.
At times, the detail gets foggy and confusing. At other times, the anecdotes about O’Neill are so terrific as to be preserved by the reader.
Read and enjoy this slice of American politics emboldened in the person of ‘Tip’ O’Neill.
‘Back When We Were Grownups’, Anne Tyler, Alfre A. Knopf, New York, 2001, 274 pages.
Anne Tyler is an extraordinary writer with a cunning sense for articulating human thought as manifest in the family relationships around which we can all identify.
In her latest novel, ‘Back When We Were Grownups’, Tyler describes the pain and joy and anxieties that a woman experiences over a generation of adulthood. The protagonist, Rebecca Davitch, is a widower with stepchildren and a daughter born of her own marriage. Much of the novel is the recounting of the work involved in raising these children as a single parent and widower.
Underneath, Rebecca wonders how life would have been so different had she married someone else. What would it be had she taken a different road? And, so, for us as readers, there is a great challenge to attend to Rebecca’s plight seeing in it a mirror for our own situation.
This novel is entertaining and edifying.