A superior sports book bound to interest more than just die-hard fans, ranking with classics like Robert Creamer’s Babe: The...
A full-scale biography of the most quoted and, possibly, the most underrated player in baseball history.
From the 1950s cartoon that ripped off his name to the Aflac commercials of recent years, Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra has had an identity and impact outside the game greater than all but Ruth, Robinson and Gehrig. A Depression-era child of Italian immigrants, Berra grew up (along with Joe Garagiola, who as a player and broadcaster would do much to burnish Berra’s folk-hero status) on “Dago Hill” in St. Louis with a strong set of values and a surprising certainty about his talent and worth as a player. His New York baseball career began in earnest after the war, and he quickly developed a reputation as a notorious bad-ball hitter and, eventually, a shrewd handler of pitchers. He only occasionally joined his hard-living Yankee teammates—Ford, Mantle, Martin—at Toots Shor’s joint or the Copacabana, preferring instead to go to the movies or attend to a growing list of product endorsements. While there are plenty of stories here to prove that Berra’s popular image is rooted in fact, Barra (The Last Coach: A Life of Paul “Bear” Bryant, 2005, etc.) reminds us how truly great a player Berra was—three-time American League MVP and ten-time World Series champion—and how smart a baseball man came disguised in his unlikely body. After his playing career, Berra coached and managed pennant-winning teams in each league. The play about him insists that Nobody Don’t Like Yogi, and while that’s not quite true—ask Willie Mays, Cleon Jones or Tom Seaver—for more than 60 years Berra has been a vital part of the game and a pop-culture icon. Now the worthy subject receives a serious biography that dignifies his baseball accomplishments and still manages to make us smile.
A superior sports book bound to interest more than just die-hard fans, ranking with classics like Robert Creamer’s Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (1974) and Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life (2000).Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06233-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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