Minor-league writing from a major-league player and person.
The former Mets’ shortstop, coach and manager revisits his career, revealing his diamond talents and work ethic, his love for the game, his two World Series appearances and his narrative limitations.
Harrelson and co-author Pepe (who’s helped other former Mets craft their memoirs—Gary Carter, Yogi Berra) mostly keep their focus between the lines, venturing out only to issue some opinions about steroids (they’re bad), upper management (sometimes bad) the media and over-exuberant fans (ditto). But readers will learn virtually nothing about Harrelson’s personal life. Oddly, the personality who does haunt the text throughout is Pete Rose. Harrelson begins with his brawl with Rose in a 1973 playoff game and twice mentions Rose’s famous 1970 home-plate collision with catcher Ray Fosse in the All-Star Game (the author avoids judgment; he merely describes). In later chapters he weighs in on Rose’s mercenary attitude about baseball memorabilia and his exclusion from the Hall of Fame (Harrelson believes this is just), and several times he mentions coaching Rose’s son in the minors. The author devotes too many pages to summaries of seasons and games, mentions his presence during some remarkable moments (the New York blackout, the Buckner error in the 1986 World Series) and pauses to praise those who helped him or whom he otherwise admires: Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel, Gil Hodges, Tom Seaver (his roommate) and others. Harrelson loves his new career as a minor league owner. Clichés abound, and numerous exclamation points stand in his prose like Louisville Sluggers.
Minor-league writing from a major-league player and person.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-66240-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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