Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin’s...
A sympathetic examination of the fiery player and manager Billy Martin (1928-1989), who could dazzle between the lines but whose life outside the stadium was often boozy, libidinous, and rudderless.
Earlier in his own career, Pennington (On Par: The Everyday Golfer's Survival Guide, 2012, etc.), now a sportswriter with the New York Times, covered the Yankees during one of Martin’s five terms as manager under owner George Steinbrenner. The author even witnessed one of Billy the Kid’s late-career barroom brawls. As he notes, Martin, slated to return for his sixth stint as manager in 1990, was killed in an accident in his pickup truck on Christmas night—an accident the author both begins and ends with, devoting many pages to the controversy about who was driving that night, Martin or his friend William Reedy (who survived). Pennington interviewed myriads for this comprehensive work—from kings to commoners. Among the latter was a housekeeper at the end of Martin’s life, a woman who tried to make Billy more accurate at the urinal. Although he focuses principally on Martin’s professional career, Pennington also explores his family background in California, his lifelong problems with drinking, his fondness for fisticuffs (he would invariably swing first), his inability to be faithful to his wives (he was married four times), his cluelessness with money, and his celebrated feuds with Steinbrenner, Reggie Jackson, and others. All the notable moments are here—Cleveland’s Ten-Cent Beer Night, the dugout fracas with Jackson, the spats with umpires (the dirt-kicking and -throwing), the firings and rehirings. As the author shows, Martin could charm as well as disgust and disappoint, and Pennington argues that although his record merits the Hall of Fame, his erratic behavior has kept him outside.
Baseball (and Yankees) fans will devour this like ballpark popcorn, and all will muse about the many what-ifs of Martin’s motley life.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-02209-6
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
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
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