In terms of overarching significance, this is a slight book. It's worthy, however, for devoted professional baseball fans...
New York Daily News sports columnist Bondy (Who's on Worst?: The Lousiest Players, Biggest Cheaters, Saddest Goats and Other Antiheroes in Baseball History, 2013, etc.) builds an entire book around one controversial play during a game between the New York Yankees and Kansas City Royals on July 24, 1983.
On that play, Royals superstar George Brett hit a home run to put his team ahead in the ninth inning. But the Yankees protested the home run, citing an obscure rule that Brett had placed more pine tar on the handle of his bat than the rules allowed. The umpires upheld the protest and awarded the victory to the Yankees, enraging Brett and the Royals. The unusual ruling made the game briefly newsworthy, and the chief reason the game sticks in the minds of baseball fans (especially those watching the game) is Brett's reaction. A highly competitive but otherwise normally polite man, he raced from the dugout with the apparent intent of attacking the umpires. One of those umpires put a headlock on Brett, releasing him only after his teammates promised to wrestle him back to the dugout. Brett's outrage was caught on tape, and since that day 30 years ago, it has been replayed countless times. Bondy's book might be difficult to fully appreciate unless readers have watched the video, since mere words cannot fully capture the extreme reaction. But the author masterfully offers context and a history of the Yankees-Royals’ complicated sports rivalry, presents minibiographies of chief participants, explains the appeal by the Royals, which was upheld by the commissioner of Major League Baseball, and provides a discussion of the aftermath of the momentous ruling.
In terms of overarching significance, this is a slight book. It's worthy, however, for devoted professional baseball fans and for its artfulness in creating a narrative focused primarily on just one pitch—like that achieved by Mike Sowell in The Pitch that Killed (1989).Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7717-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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
SEEN & HEARD
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