by Ed Lucas ; Christopher Lucas ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2015
Filled with a life-affirming sincerity that challenges us to put our lives in greater perspective.
A memoir of faith and perseverance after a dramatically life-altering circumstance.
How New Jersey Sports Hall of Fame member Ed Lucas went from sandlot dreamer to blindness to broadcaster for the greatest team in baseball history is a marvel of a story. Co-written with his son, Christopher, this book recounts the accident that left young Ed blind and struggling to adapt to a dark new reality. What he found in that unexpected darkness was a future populated by heroes, filled with love, and enlightened by indomitable faith. As Sister Rose Magdalene proclaimed to his father, “Mister Lucas, your son is just blind, he’s not handicapped….” As the author learned to thrive with his blindness, his mother began a letter-writing campaign to famous baseball personalities requesting their time and mentorship for her young son. To everyone’s surprise, it worked, encouraging what would become a lifetime love for the game and its legends. But how does a blind man become a major league baseball broadcaster? As he gradually made himself known in the world of MLB, Lucas “developed the ability to tell, just from the crack of the bat, how hard the ball was hit, where it was traveling, and the distance it would go.” Easy to read, this tender, occasionally sappy narrative shines most as an illustration of faith at work. For the Lucas family, faith is the cornerstone of purposefulness, hope, and the belief that one can achieve happiness and greatness despite traumatic circumstances. Most importantly, Lucas’ contributions to sports journalism are invaluable, and the book is a testament to the experiences of a man intimately tied to the game throughout the modern era.
Filled with a life-affirming sincerity that challenges us to put our lives in greater perspective.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8583-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Jeter Publishing/Gallery Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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