Appealing, affecting stories too often prevented from soaring by the weight of hero-worship and self-regard.
Nature’s four seasons are inadequate, we learn in this scattered, disjunctive memoir by one of the deans of diamond writing. We need a fifth—baseball season.
Although he doubles as a novelist (The Ghost of Major Pryor, 1997, etc.), it is the baseball diamond that most engages Honig, who has produced a head-high stack of volumes over the course of several decades (Classic Baseball Photographs, 1869–1947, 1999, etc.), many dealing with the lumber-waving, flame-throwing demigods he’s idolized since childhood. Here, he wanders through his memories, sometimes with a purpose, sometimes with the aimlessness of a patron lost in a labyrinthine museum imagined by Steven Millhauser. He recalls favorite moments from games past, interviews aging, often reluctant and irascible players and describes his brief flirtation with glory after being signed by the Red Sox. (He traveled to Florida, attended a minor-league camp, impressed few with his pitching, lost his virginity in a beach scene out of From Here to Eternity, failed to survive the first cut and returned swiftly home, where he soon realized that writing was his game.) The strongest sections deal most directly with his life. The most powerful of these describes a late-night visit to his old neighborhood in Queens after decades of absence. Wandering the back streets, he sees “the figure of the boy who had walked here those years ago plotting and designing his future, which was now my past.” Instead of ending with this affecting image, Honig offers a few more superfluous stories about meeting Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and ends with a daffy riff on global warming—hey, it would give us a longer baseball season! Much more effective are his interviews with the long-forgotten pitchers, infielders and sluggers who populate the less-lofty regions of baseball’s Mount Olympus.
Appealing, affecting stories too often prevented from soaring by the weight of hero-worship and self-regard.Pub Date: March 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56663-810-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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