A soufflé of anecdote, revenge served cold and self-promotion.
A Hall of Fame umpire calls the game of his own life, concluding, “By God, I loved every minute of it.”
Harvey, now an octogenarian battling oral cancer and the effects of strokes, teams with veteran co-author Golenbock (Glory in the Fall: The Greatest Moments in World Series History, 2010, etc.) to produce a breezy and sometimes-grumpy memoir about his years in major league baseball. There is no shortage of self-regard (see the subtitle), and the author repeatedly reminds readers that he was the best. Later in his text, he even repeats, virtually verbatim, a story he’d told earlier about being named the second-greatest umpire of all time. In most other ways, the text is yawningly conventional: We begin with Harvey’s boyhood during the Depression, his scholastic days (he excelled at basketball), his early marriage and divorce (his second marriage has lasted more than 50 years), his decision to become an umpire and his rapid rise to the big leagues (“faster than anyone else ever has”). Harvey also did some basketball refereeing (and was great at that as well). Along the way he settles a few old grudges (“asshole” appears throughout) and grinds a few old axes (low pay, wimpy commissioners, contentious players and managers). He soon tires of chronology and settles into an I-remember-when mode. Koufax was the best pitcher he ever saw; Musial, the best hitter; Mays, the best overall player. Pete Rose was great but deserves his exclusion from the game. Alleged spit-balling pitcher Gaylord Perry was “the cleverest motherfucker I ever saw.” Harvey revisits his close and controversial calls, the violence on the field (Juan Marichal hitting catcher John Roseboro on the head with a bat), the unionization of players and umpires, and the heavy drinking on the road.
A soufflé of anecdote, revenge served cold and self-promotion.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4878-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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