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
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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