This loving family biography of a husband, father, baseball player, pioneer and crusader for justice serves as a fitting...
A family’s recollection of a baseball, and humanitarian, legend.
When Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) died in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve in 1972, he was delivering emergency supplies to Nicaragua, which had just suffered catastrophic earthquakes. Clemente was a Hall of Fame outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates and represented to Latin baseball players what Jackie Robinson did to African-American players. But he was also deeply committed to humanitarian causes, to which he planned to devote his post-playing life. Effectively an oral history and scrapbook, the book is unabashedly hagiographic. CBSSports.com writer Mike Freeman compiles the memories of the Clemente family, including Roberto’s sons, wife and brothers, as well as other oral testimonies and journalistic accounts of Clemente’s life and career. The book traces Clemente’s life from his roots in Puerto Rico, a territory to which he remained devoted, through his career with the Pirates, for which he earned the National League MVP in 1966. He was also a 15-time All-Star and won 12 Gold Glove awards and four batting titles. The dozens of pictures and the family reminiscences capture Clemente the player and the man. One can only wonder what Clemente could have accomplished on the field, but especially off of it, had he only survived to continue the work to which he had increasingly come to devote his life. As he remarked in 1971 after receiving the Tris Speaker Award, “If you have a chance to accomplish something that will make things better for people coming behind you, and you don’t do that, you are wasting your time on this Earth.”
This loving family biography of a husband, father, baseball player, pioneer and crusader for justice serves as a fitting tribute to a truly great man. For a fuller portrait, pair with David Maraniss’ Clemente (2006).Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-451-41903-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celebra/Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
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
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