Simon and Garfunkel famously asked, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Clavin reminds readers that Joe is not the only...
A fine biography of the greatest brother combination ever to play major league baseball.
Vincent, Joe and Dominic DiMaggio lived out the American dream. Three brothers of 11 children born to Italian immigrants, the three boys excelled first in the Pacific Coast League for the local San Francisco Seals and then, one-by-one, they rose to play in the major leagues. Vince, the eldest of the three, broke his father’s prohibition against wasting time with games and thus paved the way for his brothers. Joe, the middle of the three, was the legend who married movie stars but was also cold and distant. Dominic, the bespectacled youngest and smallest of the trio, was a star in his own right but lived in the shadow of Joe. The journeyman Vince had the most trouble adjusting to post-baseball life and struggled just to make ends meet. Joe continued to be reticent and reserved, never recovering from his star-crossed marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and effectively made a career out of being Joe DiMaggio, legend. Dominick meanwhile, had the most grounded and, in many ways, successful post-baseball career, using his intellect to become a successful businessman. A fourth West Coast native, Ted Williams, plays almost as much of a role in the book as the brothers DiMaggio. He and teammate Dominic continued to be close for the remainder of their lives, with Williams always maintaining that Dominic belonged in the Hall of Fame. Clavin clearly agrees, and it is a strength of this evocative book that while Joe remains the legend, Dominic comes across as the most admirable DiMaggio in the end.
Simon and Garfunkel famously asked, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Clavin reminds readers that Joe is not the only DiMaggio worth remembering.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218377-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
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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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