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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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