ROBERTO CLEMENTE

Virtually the same biographical outline, filled in with far less style and spirit than Kenneth Rudeen brought to his recent Crowell Biography of the late Pirates star (see KR, p. 539, J-233). Mercer tells a maudlin tale of Clemente's mother sticking his bat in the oven to keep him off the playing fields and later delivers a sober lecture about Puerto Rican poverty, where Rudeen used Clemente's childhood homemade baseball to make both points effectively. And Loh's washed out pencil drawings, as perfunctory as the text itself, are often barely recognizable as Clemente.