A nuanced, expertly written life of much more than a sports hero.
Roberto Clemente wasn’t the best baseball player ever, but he was a great one—and one absolutely necessary for his time and his team.
So claims Washington Post editor Maraniss (They Marched Into Sunlight, 2003) in this agile biography of the immutably proud Clemente, who wore his anger and sense of injustice as a badge of honor, certain that he and his fellow Latino ballplayers were undervalued and exploited. He complained of the sports press, for instance: “They have an open preference for North Americans. Mediocre players receive immense publicity while true stars are not highlighted as they deserve.” He wasn’t thinking selfishly only of himself, but of Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, Julio Roubert and other players who had just crossed a sometimes double color line—not just against blacks, but against just about anyone whose first language was not English. Clemente distinguished himself as a baseball player, going to heroic lengths for the Pittsburgh Pirates (though he really wanted to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers), with whom he spent his entire professional career (1954–72). Clemente’s extraordinary performance in the 1960 World Series is the stuff of legend, with the Pirates beating the Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris–era New York Yankees, and Maraniss delivers an exciting reconstruction. He is clearly at home with the workings of the game, and his account of Clemente’s ability to judge whether a bat was any good from the way it sounded (he was also an amateur woodworker) will please anyone who remembers the pre-aluminum days. Yet Maraniss scores a double play by tracking Clemente’s evolution as a social force: The ballplayer indeed helped break down racial barriers, and was a humanitarian and philanthropist to boot. It seems that Clemente could have played until he was 100, but he died in a plane crash while delivering aid to victims of the 1972 earthquake that shattered Nicaragua.
A nuanced, expertly written life of much more than a sports hero.Pub Date: April 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-1781-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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