A string of pearly anecdotes that reverberate far beyond the diamond.
Affectionate, informed, and smooth-as-cream portrait of four Boston Red Sox greats and their abiding friendship over many years.
Even back then, it was “something unusual for baseball: four men who played for one team, who became good friends, and remained friends for the rest of their lives.” Now, writes Halberstam (Firehouse, 2002, etc.), with free agency creating volatility in the rosters and salaries serving to lessen the connection between teammates, this story of Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Johnny Pesky is especially poignant. All four were Bosox stars in the 1940s and Halberstam re-creates many of the great moments of that decade, though perhaps even more enjoyable here are the sweet nuggets and inside observations of the men—of Pesky taking the fall for a bad play by Leon Culberson that lost the 1946 World Series because of the code mandating one player never point a finger at another, and reminiscing of Yankee pitcher Spud Chandler, “God, he was mean. He'd hit you in the ass, just for the sheer pleasure of it,” and tuning in to excerpts from the Ted Williams Lecture Series. As ever, Halberstam, always a welcome sportswriter, finely delineates the personalities: Doerr's preternatural emotional equilibrium, the guileless Pesky, Williams’s contentiousness, animal energy, and generosity. He also provides enough family history to give a sense of how extraordinary it was these four men came to be such great players, and how each in turn readily acknowledged their great good fortune at having been able to be part of the game at all. And the story lightly revolves around a car trip by Pesky, DiMaggio, and humorist Dick Flavin for a last visit with the rapidly dwindling Williams, highlighting the fact that all of the men may soon be gone and with them a classy style of play no longer in evidence.
A string of pearly anecdotes that reverberate far beyond the diamond.Pub Date: May 14, 2003
ISBN: 1-4013-0057-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
Fly fisherwomen are increasingly ``claiming their stretch of the river,'' states Morris (Uncommon Waters, 1991), who claims space on the sportsman's (sic) shelf for high-quality, knowledgeable work by women. Avoiding ``great gonzo stories laced with competition and one- upmanship,'' Morris opts for humor and insight in selections that reflect how women come to fly-fishing from a different direction. Not a traditional rite of passage for women, the sport is a means of ``finding self by moving in tune with nature's rhythms.'' Fly- casting expert Joan Salvato Wulff notes that as a child her favorite pastimes were fishing, ballet, and tap dancing. Studying dance, she believes, improved her casting because it taught her to use her whole body. Though ``women bond faster, tighter, deeper,'' according to outdoor writer Pam Houston, she admits to envying the simple, timeless rituals of male bonding, which she observes firsthand while fishing in Michigan at 2 a.m. in midwinter ``with a bunch of male poets'' and ``lunatic outdoorsmen.'' In a well- crafted, funny essay, novelist E. Annie Proulx tells of her excursion to Vermont with Sven, a man who ``attracts trouble the way some dogs attract porcupines''; during the trip they breach a beaver dam that's flooded an old access road in hopes of unsticking Sven's prized fishing car so they can get to a possibly mythic lake. Entries by American Fly Fisher editor Margot Page, novelist Lorian Hemingway, Forbes editor Allison Moir, and conservationist Elizabeth Storer are also deserving of attention. But the best find comes from poet Ailm Travler, who notes that fly-fishing, like any other passion, ``is about suffering,'' especially in her home state of New Mexico, ``where the very existence of water is a contradiction.'' A noteworthy, entertaining collection.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-878067-63-X
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
Mountain guide Boukreev tells his version of the events of the May 1996 Mt. Everest disaster, in which five climbers died, in an effort to clear his name of damning allegations made in Jon Krakauer's bestselling Into Thin Air. Boukreev is well known in climbing circles as a good, tough, experienced guide, not especially personable or given to pampering the clients, but utterly reliable, especially in tight situations. So it came as a shock when Krakauer called into question Boukreev's behavior on that fateful day: Why had the guide raced down the mountain before his clients? Was it because he was improperly dressed and climbing without supplemental oxygen? Was it true he ``cut and ran'' when needed most, as charged by a Boukreev client whom Krakauer quotes? Boukreev provides a detailed history of his team's expedition (the book is told as an alternating duet, with Boukreev doing the play-by-play and investigative filmmaker DeWalt handling long swaths of color commentary), of the things that went right on the climb and the many that went wrong, as well as a minute examination of his climbing philosophy. And he successfully parries Krakauer's accusations: He was appropriately dressed and has photos to prove it; he climbs without supplemental oxygen because he feels it makes him stronger, not weaker, especially in situations where oxygen runs out; and, indeed, oxygen was fast running out for his clients, which is why he hurried down, with the consent of his team's leader, to be prepared to ferry tanks back up if needed. Not that the book is without its own glitches, such as inconsistency (``You can receive a lot more information observing the clients' external appearance'' and ``Appearances meant nothing''). Such a pall of anger and defensiveness hangs over Boukreev's account that only those with a personal interest in his reputation will find much solace in his story.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16814-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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