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ROGERS HORNSBY

A BIOGRAPHY

A thorough yet static portrait of one of the most accomplished players of baseball's ``golden age.'' ``I have never been a yes man,'' declared Rogers Hornsby in a 1950 interview, and this statement sums up his character. Alexander (History/Ohio Univ.; Our Game: An American Baseball History, 1991) depicts his subject as a man of strange contrasts: a teetotaler but also an inveterate gambler; a devoted son but by most accounts an absentee (and occasionally indifferent) father. Born in 1896, Hornsby was raised by his widowed mother and spent his youth working the stockyards in and around Fort Worth, playing industrial-league ball whenever time permitted. Initially undersized and unspectacular, he eventually grew into a player worthy of reckoning, generally acknowledged as the sport's greatest right-handed hitter. In 1915, at the height of a talent war initiated by the upstart Federal League, Hornsby joined the National League's St. Louis Cardinals and quickly became the senior circuit's best-known, best-paid star. But he had a prickly nature and wore out his welcome with the Cards (and their brilliant martinet of a general manager, Branch Rickey) after he led the team to their first World Series championship in 1926. Gradually, after playing relatively short stints for a succession of teams including the Giants, Braves, and Cubs, Hornsby became something of a baseball vagabond; itinerant employment, failed marriages, and mounting gambling debts frequently brought him to the brink of insolvency. However, owing to his professional reputationhe was named by baseball writers to the ``all-time all-stars'' in 1957he remained involved in some capacity with the game until his death in 1963. Alexander conveys an impressive wealth of facts, though his narrative seldom jumps off the page; nor does he satisfactorily explain how the game changed during Hornsby's career. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: July 27, 1995

ISBN: 0-8050-2002-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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