There will be little readership for the book outside of baseball fans, especially in the Atlanta area, but those fans will...
An Atlanta Braves legend tells his story.
When Jones retired from Major League Baseball at the end of the 2012 season, he did so as a franchise hero. One of the greatest switch hitters in the long history of the game, Jones, the 1999 National League MVP, eight-time All-Star, World Series champion, and one of the linchpins of the franchise’s glory years, played for his entire career, including 19 years in the major league, in the Atlanta Braves organization. In the parlance of some traditionalists, Jones played the game “the right way.” His autobiography, ably co-authored by Walton, who covered the Braves for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, tells about the life and career of a small-town Florida guy who wanted to play professional baseball from the age of 4. His main inspiration was his father, a former college baseball player and high school coach who became the primary influence on his career. Jones left his small town to play for a larger high school where his exploits earned him selection as the first overall pick in the 1990 MLB draft and a hefty signing bonus. Jones is no saint—he unflinchingly details his two failed marriages, one of which fell apart because of his serial infidelities that produced a child—but he doesn’t offer much in the way of true insight, maintaining the focus on his love of the sport, his approach to the game, and his successes and failures on the field. Jones was undoubtedly a great player but not a transcendent figure.
There will be little readership for the book outside of baseball fans, especially in the Atlanta area, but those fans will find a clear, readable old-school account of a player who almost certainly will be voted into the Hall of Fame, possibly as early as 2018, his first year of eligibility.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98440-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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