Mets fans in particular will enjoy this wholly unique perspective on one of their fondest memories.
As we approach the 30th anniversary, a former All-Star pitcher, now broadcaster, reflects on the last game of the historic 1986 World Series.
Remember Vin Scully’s famous 10th inning call about Mookie Wilson’s little dribbler along first? Rolling “behind the bag!...it gets through Buckner!...here comes Knight!...and the Mets win it!” Even hard-core fans sometimes forget the New York Mets needed a seventh game to seal the series victory over the Boston Red Sox, a contest Darling (The Complete Game: Reflections on Baseball, Pitching, and Life on the Mound, 2009) left after three innings, having put his team in a three-run hole. With an assist from Paisner, Darling revisits this “bittersweet” moment of personal failure and team success. During the course of his inning-by-inning treatment, the author analyzes the reasons for his collapse: hoping simply to avoid embarrassment, leaving the door open to worry and fear, refusing to go earlier to his breaking ball. He poignantly recalls the “walk of shame” back to the dugout after failing to deliver in the big spot. He expands the narrative to explain the various meanings of the baseball “glove tap,” to deconstruct the pitcher-batter-catcher dynamic upon which the umpire sometimes intrudes, and to recall his blue-collar boyhood in Massachusetts. He focuses, though, on Game 7, assessing Boston stars like Jim Rice, Wade Boggs, Dwight Evans, schoolboy rival Rich Gedman, and opposing pitcher Bruce Hurst and commenting on notable teammates like Keith Hernandez, Lenny Dykstra, Doc Gooden, Gary Carter, and Darryl Strawberry. These Mets saw themselves as a team of destiny, brimming with the necessary talent, killer instinct, arrogance, and even a certain selfishness to claw back the game Darling had almost given away. These hard-partying ballplayers proved, in Darling’s words, “too young, too full of ourselves” to be great for more than one season, wasting their gifts and a very real chance at a dynasty. But in ’86, they were magic.
Mets fans in particular will enjoy this wholly unique perspective on one of their fondest memories.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06919-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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