Nice guys do not always finish last, but they also do not necessarily make the most compelling subjects for biography.
Wilson (The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych, 2013) delivers a pedestrian treatment of an impressive baseball player and admirable man.
Brooks Robinson is, by all accounts, a wonderful, kind man. During his Hall of Fame baseball career as a third baseman with the Baltimore Orioles from 1955 to 1977, he was universally loved as a teammate and respected as an opponent. Growing up in Arkansas, he was raised in a close family, and he eventually had a close family of his own. Throughout his entire career, he was never the source of controversy; in fact, he seemed almost too good to be true. On the field, the third baseman was one of the greatest fielders in the history of major league baseball, a status already earned but cemented by his performance in the 1970 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, when he put on one of the most scintillating performances in the history of the game. At bat, Robinson accumulated respectable and intermittently impressive numbers (.267 career batting average and more than 2,800 hits), though without his glove, he almost certainly would have been a borderline candidate for enshrinement in Cooperstown. Baseball fans of a certain age will welcome Wilson’s biography of the Baltimore Orioles' star. However, the best sports biographies transcend the games the athletes play in order to reveal something significant about the man or the time in which he lived. Whether through the limitations of the biographer or his subject, this one does not. Since Robinson embodied the ideal of the mid-20th-century All-American athlete, the book often reads like a hagiographic Frank Merriwell tale come to life, including plenty of clichés and aw-shucks language.
Nice guys do not always finish last, but they also do not necessarily make the most compelling subjects for biography.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03304-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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