A fascinating look at one man’s improbable athletic journey, offering insight into one of sport’s most cerebral positions.
Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Platt (Only the Strong Survive: The Odyssey of Allen Iverson, 2002, etc.) tells the story of how Moyer turned a below-average career into the stuff of legend, becoming, at 49, the oldest pitcher in Major League Baseball history to win a game.
Released from the Texas Rangers in 1990 at the age of 28, Moyer’s career might well have been over. Instead, he went on to pitch for six more big-league clubs, win a World Series with his hometown Philadelphia Phillies and rise to No. 35 on the all-time wins list with 269. With a sub–90 mph fastball even in his prime, Moyer’s success is a slap in the face to the number-crunching statisticians manning professional baseball’s front offices. As the book’s title suggests, much of that success is credited to his never-say-die attitude and determination to prove doubters and naysayers—of whom there are many—wrong. Equally as much, if not more, is attributed to his mastery of the mental game, learned through his relationship with baseball psychology guru Harvey Dorfman. Though the book is presented as a memoir by Moyer, it is narrated entirely by Platt, who was there to witness the pitcher’s struggles as he attempted to come back yet again following a 2011 injury that should have ended his career. There’s more than enough drama in Moyer’s unique story to overcome the book’s slightly confusing chronology, and the subject comes across as one of professional sports’ all-too-rare truly good guys. But the real value here is in the portrait of the mind of an elite pitcher, revealing the inner structures of the game in a way that will deepen even a casual fan’s understanding and enjoyment.
A fascinating look at one man’s improbable athletic journey, offering insight into one of sport’s most cerebral positions.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2158-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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