Most readers will agree with the authors’ final assessment that Finley was an innovative, infuriating jackass whose braying...
Two aerospace researchers examine the labyrinthine life of one of baseball’s most notorious owners, displaying both revulsion and grudging respect for their subject.
NASA senior planner Green and Smithsonian Air and Space Museum senior curator Launius do a creditable job pinning down both the mundane and the extraterrestrial aspects of Charles Oscar Finley’s remarkable rise. From his humble roots in Gary, Ind., Finley ascended to become owner of the Oakland Athletics in the early ’70s, a team that won three consecutive World Series and featured Vida Blue, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Catfish Hunter and other All-Stars and future Hall-of-Famers. Born in 1918, Finley moved to Chicago for college, then entered the insurance industry and ignited the boom-or-bust pattern that zigzagged across his entire career. After finding great financial success by insuring physicians, Finley sought to buy a baseball franchise and found a failing one in Kansas City, where all his vagaries, innovations, insecurities, weaknesses, strengths and irascibility exploded like post-game fireworks into the Kansas sky. He hired, harassed, fired and even traded managers with stunning suddenness, befriended then alienated players, fought with the press, experimented with myriad marketing promotions and began lobbying for changes in the sport, including the designated hitter, night World Series games and interleague play. Thinking Oakland would be a lucrative baseball market, he moved his team there in 1968. He was wrong. Even in their championship seasons, the A’s could not draw a million fans. Finley’s fall ensued, caused by a complicated and ruinous divorce, losing battles with emerging free agency, mutual animosity with commissioner Bowie Kuhn, mismanagement and a kind of regal recklessness.
Most readers will agree with the authors’ final assessment that Finley was an innovative, infuriating jackass whose braying was sometimes sensible, even wise.Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1745-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
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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