The author is to be commended for straightening out his life, but his memoir is not very reflective or illuminating.
A son polishes his famous father’s legend while confessing how and why he fell short of his own potential.
Nobody ever thought Dale Berra would be another Yogi, but Dale wasn’t just riding his father’s coattails. As he tells it, “I was the best prospect in the Pirates organization, the best minor league prospect in the country. Triple-A is filled with the best prospects, and I was better than all of them.” Even more than his father, who had faced considerable resistance from his Italian immigrant father about making a living by playing a game, Dale was set on playing major league ball—and there was no Plan B. Though he made it to the majors before he was 22, he was out of baseball less than a decade later. Even if it hadn’t been for the cocaine, he likely wouldn’t have been good enough to fulfill the expectations of a first-round draft choice. This memoir is really two stories: First is the familiar one of the famous father as seen through the eyes of the sons who loved him. (Dale’s brothers are quoted extensively, and they all loved and respected their father even if he didn’t play catch with them and wasn’t around much during the baseball season.) Those who want to learn about Yogi Berra will get a good introduction here, but there are better biographies, along with plenty of accounts of the Yankee championship teams of which he was such an integral part. That leaves Dale’s story, and it is no more exceptional as a drug recovery story than his baseball career was. He used cocaine “because, literally, everyone was doing it,” and one of his arrests cost him his first marriage. His family staged an intervention when he continued using, and he has been sober for two decades since.
The author is to be commended for straightening out his life, but his memoir is not very reflective or illuminating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-52545-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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
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