A labor of love of great value to Yankees fans and hard-core baseball junkies, but not too many others.
Everything you need to know—and much, much more—about a baseball magnate you probably didn’t know existed.
Born in 1868, Edward Grant Barrow was one of the sport’s original renaissance men. He began his professional career in 1903 as manager of the Detroit Tigers, but didn’t gain any serious notoriety until he led the Boston Red Sox to a championship in 1918. Excellent on-field tactician though he was, Barrow is best known for his 1920-45 stint as the New York Yankees’s head front-office honcho. During his tenure, he not only put together the minor-league system but helped the Yankees become a dynasty for decades with his brilliant personnel moves, acquiring and/or nurturing Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, among many others. Baseball insiders were appreciative of Barrow’s impact on the game—he was elected into the Hall of Fame only eight years after the conclusion of his career with the Yankees—but the average fan wasn’t necessarily aware of his existence, which is still the case today. Does Barrow’s role in baseball history merit a nearly 500-page exhumation? Levitt (coauthor, Paths to Glory: How Great Baseball Teams Got That Way, 2003) would certainly answer in the affirmative. A baseball geek writing for baseball geeks—and that is meant in the kindest, most respectful way—the author has an astounding facility with detail: The sheer number of names, dates and salaries he tosses around is mind-blowing, and the 18 informational tables in the appendix are worthy of inclusion in an economics textbook. The primary drawback here is that Barrow is ultimately a footnote, albeit one of the most important footnotes, in baseball history.
A labor of love of great value to Yankees fans and hard-core baseball junkies, but not too many others.Pub Date: April 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2974-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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