Short vignettes skim through the childhoods of a gathering of sports heroes.
The “True Tales” of the subtitle doesn’t necessarily mean riveting tales, as Stabler proves with these mostly ho-hum glimpses at sporting legends such as Jackie Robinson, Bobby Orr, and Danica Patrick (there are 16 personalities all told). The book is divided into three sections: future stars who had to battle money or gender issues; kids who got family encouragement; kids who learned it takes practice, practice, practice. There is no hope if you can’t coax a good story out of Babe Ruth, and Stabler can’t: “So when Little George was seven, his parents asked a local official to declare him ‘incorrigible’ and to send him to a reformatory”—and the bulk of the entry focuses on young George’s development of a moral compass under the tutelage of Brother Matthias. So what if Peyton Manning was traumatized by dancing a tango in a school play? Many readers will already have experienced greater embarrassments, and the implication that dancing is an activity not befitting a football player is positively retrograde. “When his father first strapped a pair of ice skates onto his son’s feet, four-year-old Bobby [Orr] promptly fell onto the ice.” Not breaking news. Horner’s line drawings are a minor relief.
Uneven to forgettable. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59474-802-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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A memoir of the first 14 years in the life of Australian Robert Hoge, born with stunted legs and a tumor in the middle of his face.
In 1972, Robert is born, the youngest of five children, with fishlike eyes on the sides of his face, a massive lump in place of his nose, and malformed legs. As baby Robert is otherwise healthy, the doctors convince his parents to approve the first of many surgeries to reduce his facial difference. One leg is also amputated, and Robert comes home to his everyday white, working-class family. There's no particular theme to the tale of Robert's next decade and a half: he experiences school and teasing, attempts to participate in sports, and is shot down by a girl. Vignette-driven choppiness and the lack of an overarching narrative would make the likeliest audience be those who seek disability stories. However, young Robert's ongoing quest to identify as "normal"—a quest that remains unchanged until a sudden turnaround on the penultimate page—risks alienating readers comfortable with their disabilities. Brief lyrical moments ("as compulsory as soggy tomato sandwiches at snack time") appeal but are overwhelmed by the dry, distant prose dominating this autobiography.
An apt choice for collections that already have stronger alternatives, such as R.J. Palacio's Wonder (2012). (Memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-425-28775-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS
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To Esther Rudomin at eleven Siberia meant the metaphor: isolation, criminals and cruel punishment, snow and wolves; but even in Siberia there is satisfaction from making a friend of a prickly classmate, from seeing a Deanna Durbin movie four times, from earning and studying and eventually belonging.
Especially in Siberia, where not wolves but hunger and dirt and cold are endemic, where shabbiness and overcrowding are taken for granted, where unselfishness is exceptional. At the heart of Mrs. Hautzig's memoir of four years as a Polish deportee in Russia during World War II is not only hardihood and adaptability but uniquely a girl like any other. Abruptly seized in their comfortable home in Vilna, Esther and her family, are shipped in cattle cars to Rubtsovsk in the Altai Territory, work as slave laborers in a gypsum mine until amnesty, then are "permitted" lobs and lodging in the village--if someone will take them in. After sleeping on the floor, a wooden platform is very welcome; after sharing a room with two other families, a separate dung hut seems a homestead. Then Esther goes to school, the greatest boon, and, to her mother's horror, wants to be like the Siberians....Deprivation does not make Esther grim: the saddest day of her life is her father's departure for a labor brigade at the front, her sharpest bitterness is for the bland viciousness of individuals.
Involving from "the end of my lovely world" to the end of exile (when the Rudomins, as Jews, were jeered in Poland), this is a beautiful book with no bar to wide acceptance (and a rich non-juvenile jacket by Nonny Hogrogian). (Memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: April 15, 1968
ISBN: 978-0-06-447027-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: T.Y. Crowell
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1968
Categories: CHILDREN'S BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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