by Daniel Ewald ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 8, 2012
A friend’s moving tribute, to be enjoyed by baseball fans and nonfans alike.
Charming, heartfelt memoir about legendary baseball manager George “Sparky” Anderson (1934–2010) by his longtime manager, co-author (They Call Me Sparky, 1998, etc.) and dear friend.
Shortly before Anderson’s death, the author sat at his kitchen table and reminisced with him, as they had done so often over the course of a 32-year friendship. Out of these conversations Ewald develops a portrait of an extraordinary person. There was no doubt about Anderson’s managing abilities; three World Series championships and a plaque in the Hall of Fame attest to that. He was also one of the last of baseball’s great characters. With a shock of white hair, craggy features, gravelly voice and a Casey Stengel–like gift for mangling the English language (“a language filled with words he created as he went along”), Anderson charmed the media and everyone else who came into contact with him. Ultimately, though, he saw himself as “a blue-collar worker who happened to wear a baseball uniform to work. No better. No worse.” No fan would ever be denied a handshake, and no working person—be it a waitress, a bus driver or a U.S. president (one or two of whom he knew)—would ever be disrespected in his presence. From Anderson, Ewald learned the simple lesson that each person has dignity and deserves both respect and compassion. In lesser hands, such a lesson could come off as trite or just another treatise on the life lessons sports can teach. But Ewald’s subtle remembrances fully flesh out Anderson’s personality. He was a person as much at home at the local supermarket (where he knew everyone’s name) as he was in a major league clubhouse. A week or so after the author’s visit Anderson was gone, but his simple but not simplistic lessons remained.
A friend’s moving tribute, to be enjoyed by baseball fans and nonfans alike.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00026-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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