Timed to come out just as he breaks the fabled Gehrig streak of 2,130 consecutive games played, this is the first adult bio of Cal Ripken Jr., written by freelancer Rosenfeld (Roger Maris: A Title to Fame, not reviewed). By and large, Baltimore Orioles shortstop Ripken is an all- American boy/man. Son of a major-league coach and manager, Ripken is a superb performer, an excellent defensive shortstop who is built (and hits) like a third baseman. A two-time American League MVP and multiple Gold Glove winner, he is also quiet, modest, likeable, and a good husband, son, and father. In short, Rip is the kind of guy you'd want your son to be or your daughter to marry. Unfortunately, people like that don't necessarily make for interesting biography, and so Rosenfeld is at something of a disadvantage. An authorized biography written with the cooperation of the family (but, significantly, without interviewing Cal Jr.), this is surprisingly honest in facing the negative side of Ripken's career, which mainly consists of questions about the Streak's effect on his hitting, the struggles that accompanied his last contract negotiation with the Orioles, and his reaction to his father's firing as the Orioles' manager in 1988. But the Streak is obviously the raison d'àtre for this book, and although he has done considerably more homework than such a volume would require, Rosenfeld's tome reads like a quickie cut-and-paste bio. The high- and lowlights of Ripken's career are here in numbing detail, filled out with quotes from teammates, opponents, and family members. The result is like reading 13 seasons' worth of old game stories from the Baltimore area papers. Too bad an Iron Man inspired such leaden prose.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13524-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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