Minor-league writing from a major-league player and person.
The former Mets’ shortstop, coach and manager revisits his career, revealing his diamond talents and work ethic, his love for the game, his two World Series appearances and his narrative limitations.
Harrelson and co-author Pepe (who’s helped other former Mets craft their memoirs—Gary Carter, Yogi Berra) mostly keep their focus between the lines, venturing out only to issue some opinions about steroids (they’re bad), upper management (sometimes bad) the media and over-exuberant fans (ditto). But readers will learn virtually nothing about Harrelson’s personal life. Oddly, the personality who does haunt the text throughout is Pete Rose. Harrelson begins with his brawl with Rose in a 1973 playoff game and twice mentions Rose’s famous 1970 home-plate collision with catcher Ray Fosse in the All-Star Game (the author avoids judgment; he merely describes). In later chapters he weighs in on Rose’s mercenary attitude about baseball memorabilia and his exclusion from the Hall of Fame (Harrelson believes this is just), and several times he mentions coaching Rose’s son in the minors. The author devotes too many pages to summaries of seasons and games, mentions his presence during some remarkable moments (the New York blackout, the Buckner error in the 1986 World Series) and pauses to praise those who helped him or whom he otherwise admires: Willie Mays, Yogi Berra, Casey Stengel, Gil Hodges, Tom Seaver (his roommate) and others. Harrelson loves his new career as a minor league owner. Clichés abound, and numerous exclamation points stand in his prose like Louisville Sluggers.
Minor-league writing from a major-league player and person.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-66240-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
