Looking back late in his baseball career, a one-time dominant phenom tells of his life at both the center and fringes of the game. As a young fireballer for the New York Mets in the mid-1980s, Dwight “Doc” Gooden was on top of the baseball world. He had success—by his early 20s, he had won Rookie of the Year honors, a Cy Young Award, and a World Series ring—and, as a superstar in the Big Apple, he had the most exciting lifestyle imaginable. Surrounded by his brash Mets teammates and Manhattan nightlife, Dwight the shy teenager quickly matured into Doc the confident party animal. Eventually, Gooden’s attention wandered from the game to the pursuit of good times, and his golden arm began to betray him just as the Mets’ presumed dynasty began to falter. (A talent-rich juggernaut in 1986, they were expected to rule baseball for years.) Serious fun off the field soon began to eclipse Dwight’s achievements on it. He was twice suspended for drug use, in 1987 and again in 1994. With the help of friends, family, and solid professional advice, Dwight reclaimed some of his glory in May 1996, when he pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees, who later that year went on to win the World Series. Gooden movingly describes the giddy joys of being young, rich, and seemingly invulnerable. He provides powerful insight into the mind of a pitcher, illuminating several elements of baseball that normally escape all but the most knowledgeable fans. When discussing his professional reversals, particularly his plunge into the gutter, he is brutally candid; he also seems to genuinely understand how his failings affected those closest to him. Assisted by Klapisch, one of the best sports scribes in the game, Gooden vividly re-creates for readers a roller- coaster ride of disparate emotions, from triumph to loss and shame. An honest, sincere, and affecting memoir.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16339-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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