Having covered the Yankees for 30 years, and with access to previously unavailable material, Madden provides a definitive...
Veteran New York Daily News sportswriter Madden (Pride of October: What It Was to Be Young and a Yankee, 2004, etc.) examines George Steinbrenner, irascible owner of the New York Yankees.
Venal and vituperative, generous and loyal, no owner dominated both his team and the headlines as Steinbrenner did. When he bought the Yankees for less than $10 million in 1972—the team is now worth more than $1 billion—he said, “I’ve got a ship company to run. I won’t have much time for baseball.” However, for the next 30 years he proceeded to micromanage the team in ways no owner ever had or, probably, ever will—from keeping track of players’ hair length to ensuring no trash bags were littering Yankee Stadium. Most importantly, riding the wave of free agency, in which players would go to the highest bidder, usually Steinbrenner, he was able to return the Yankees to greatness, winning seven World Series titles between 1977 and 2009. But success came at a price for his employees. Public humiliation was common, and no general manager or manager could know from one day to the next whether or not he would still have a job. Born in 1930, the son of a demanding father he could never please, Steinbrenner had always been drawn to sports, even coaching college football until called to run the family shipping business, which he did with great success. Madden speculates that his bullying manner, though he was capable of great personal kindness, grew from an unrequited desire to impress his father. Whatever the case, the author covers the soap-opera tales of Steinbrenner’s relationship with superstar players like Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield, and with a revolving door of managers, including the troubled Billy Martin, whom Steinbrenner would hire and fire five times. Old age and illness finally removed Steinbrenner from the Yankees’ center stage, and with that an era ended.
Having covered the Yankees for 30 years, and with access to previously unavailable material, Madden provides a definitive and captivating biography of “The Boss.”Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-169031-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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