Professional sports, like life, is messy and complex, but Bean has done athletes a service by relieving them of the...
The story of professional baseball player Bean, lost in the closet of his homosexuality for so many years, who finds his honesty only after he leaves the game.
Bean always knew he wanted to play sports, but his sexual orientation was much more of a mystery. Writing with the startled earnestness of a man who unexpectedly finds himself in a confessional, Bean remembers never quite understanding the fuss about girls in high school or feeling much fulfillment in marriage. On the other hand, his need to please his coaches “bordered on the pathological,” perhaps from desire to win “the approval I’d been denied by my biological father.” Once in the major leagues, he knew the approval of his teammates was equally important. Considering the general homophobic atmosphere of the clubhouse, Bean wasn’t about to confide his mixed feelings to his teammates—he couldn’t, after all, even confide them to himself. When he did recognize and accept his sexuality, he kept it quiet, at a dreadful emotional toll—he couldn’t talk about the death of his boyfriend, which by terrible coincidence occurred the same day Bean was told he was being sent back to the minors—a toll he doesn’t wish on any other young gay player. On this he’s clear, but elsewhere there is ambiguity. He says that “the greatest game on earth should be leading the way for equality, as it did in the days of racial integration” but notes later that “the change didn’t occur because management had the best interests of black athletes at heart.” He describes the “malicious, anti-gay climate of the game” but says, after he came out, that “the bonds of teammates, I was learning, were far stronger than prejudice.”
Professional sports, like life, is messy and complex, but Bean has done athletes a service by relieving them of the gay-bashing mantle.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56924-486-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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