A scholarly approach to the refashioning of the Negro leagues and its effects on organized baseball.
The story of a black Latino's rise and fall while reshaping America's favorite pastime.
Burgos (Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line, 2007) recounts the life of Alex Pompez, “the Harlem numbers king who became professional baseball's greatest importer of Latin American talent.” Though Pompez became well-known for his high-stakes gambling, he used his winnings to fund his passion, baseball. Ostensibly, the book is about baseball, though it soon becomes clear that it's actually a study in race relations. Burgos is at his best when he addresses the race issue, considering the surroundings and offering insight into mid-20th-century Harlem. The middle of the story drowns in Pompez’s legal woes (racketeering charges brought against him by an overzealous prosecutor with political ambitions), though after the trial, the narrative finally returns to its roots—the influx of foreign-born players whom Pompez ushered into the game. The story eventually expands to include Jackie Robinson's momentous integration to Major League Baseball, and the author notes how this progressive act prompted professional teams to sign Latino players as well. Burgos also explores integration’s negative effects, especially how Robinson's entrance into the Majors served as “the beginning of a massive talent drain from the Negro leagues into organized baseball.” The author writes that Pompez’s life story is “more than the redemption song of a criminal mastermind.” Instead, it “illustrates the promise of America and its lived contradictions during the twentieth century, especially when it comes to how the color line influenced just about every aspect of American life”—including the national pastime.
A scholarly approach to the refashioning of the Negro leagues and its effects on organized baseball.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9479-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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