A one-of-a-kind slugger keeps his uniform clean in this chronicle of his days in baseball.
The ups and downs of a legendary baseball career.
In an introduction that covers his early years in the Dominican Republic, Ortiz, who co-authored this book with sportswriter and radio host Holley, notes that he defied heavy odds just to survive, much less become a successful professional player. No one who follows baseball will deny that he was an imposing presence or that he was one of the finest clutch hitters of all time. He was a major contributor to the reversal of the historical misfortunes of the Boston Red Sox, beginning with their World Series victory in 2004 and continuing with another in 2007. After the 2013 Patriot’s Day Marathon bombing, Ortiz became one of the voices of “Boston Strong” and helped the team, and the city, to a therapeutic World Series victory. Along the way, there were, of course, bumps in the road. Ortiz feels he was underestimated by his first big league manager, Tom Kelly of the Minnesota Twins, and that his uneven start in the majors was primarily due to this. In 2009, Ortiz was accused of using performance-enhancing drugs and suffered a slump that had many observers suggesting he was finished. His marriage fractured, though he does not say exactly why, and he had more troubles with a manager, this time Bobby Valentine, in 2012, and recurring contract issues. Ortiz describes a few of his teammates, most notably Manny Ramirez, who was both “a hitting genius” and unpredictable and “rude,” and Jon Lester, a pitcher who recovered from cancer to return to the big leagues. Ortiz appears positive, constructive, and determined to succeed, and though he deploys a few vulgarities for effect, nothing upsets his cheerful optimism. There are a few intriguing behind-the-scenes anecdotes, but Ortiz offers little self-critical thought. Readers who have already canonized Big Papi will be reassured, but those who hoped to meet a more rounded, multidimensional human will struggle to find him here.
A one-of-a-kind slugger keeps his uniform clean in this chronicle of his days in baseball.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-81461-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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