An intimate memoir of the Negro Leagues by one of its greatest players. Though Riley (The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, not reviewed) gets credit for helping Leonard write his autobiography, this book reads as if it were a verbatim transcription of Leonard's taped reminiscences. That is the book's weakness and its strength. It rambles and lacks consistent narrative structure, but it is also an important memoir of an era in American sports—and in American history—that has only begun to get the attention it deserves. The slick-fielding first baseman was one of the best hitters in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to 1950, and most observers believe that if it weren't for segregation he would have been a superstar in the major leagues. Leonard's memory is encyclopedic: He recalls plays and players from when he was a 13- year-old playing semi-pro ball in 1921 to his last game, at 47, in a Mexican league in 1955. He tells stories of grueling three-games- a-day schedules; of endless travel from one seedy segregated hotel to another; of lousy pay and breached contracts; and of winters spent in menial labor to make ends meet. Lou Gehrig, the white player to whom Leonard is most often compared, had a far more comfortable life, but Leonard expresses no rancor and only mild regret. Nor, at 87, does he romanticize the past. The Negro Leagues were not as good as the major leagues, he writes, and it is virtually impossible to measure black players of the era against their white counterparts. Leonard writes that Gehrig probably was a better player than he was. But he also wishes he'd had the chance to find out. An invaluable historical document and the record of a remarkable life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7867-0119-6
Page Count: 274
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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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