An outstanding addition to the literature of baseball.
Sprawling, entertaining life of the baseball great, renowned as a sports hero while leading a life as checkered as Babe Ruth’s or Ty Cobb’s.
“My name is Ted Fuckin’ Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.” So recited Williams, by Boston Globe editor Bradlee’s account, as a mantra before each game, “interrupting it only occasionally to offer a lecture on the finer points of hitting to anyone who cared to listen.” He had the credentials to deliver such lectures, of course; Bradlee does indeed acknowledge him as “the greatest hitter who ever lived,” and few in baseball have bettered Williams’ numbers. Like Ruth, Williams was a bruiser with a chip on his shoulder; like Cobb, race was his bête noire, for, as Bradlee reveals, Williams had a Mexican mother and took great pains to conceal that ancestry, both fearful of discrimination and perhaps with an element of self-loathing. Williams had a reputation as a military hero as well, which he did nothing to gainsay, even if he did his best to stay out of the draft in World War II and resisted his reactivation during the Korean War. Williams ended life with a bit of sideways fame as well, having been decapitated and frozen after death in a cryonics venture that did not end well; Bradlee’s description of the macabre proceedings is not for the faint of heart. The author dishes plenty—one of the kindest things he says about Williams as a human being was that he was “self-absorbed”—but the repeated demonstrations of flawed character do nothing to diminish Williams’ outsized stature as a player. Bradlee is as enthusiastic as Vin Scully or Harry Caray when it comes to describing Williams on the field: “He allowed three hits, one run, walked none, and struck out Rudy York on three pitches. The move seemed an attempt…to placate angry fans with some pure entertainment in one of the worst losses of the year.”
An outstanding addition to the literature of baseball.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-61435-1
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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