A pleasing slice of baseball nostalgia that offers relevance to today’s game.
The history of a fascinating franchise during professional baseball’s colorful 1970s era.
Sports journalist Turbow (co-author: The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls—the Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime, 2010) focuses on Charlie Finley (1918-1996), the owner of the Oakland Athletics franchise, and the key players on his flamboyant championship teams of the early 1970s. Finley, who earned his fortune in the insurance industry, never won acceptance in the club of wealthy, white male owners of Major League Baseball teams. He was irreverent about the rules and traditions of the game, and, perhaps as shocking to the baseball establishment, he openly exhibited his control-freak nature, narcissism, “hard-edged attitude,” illogical penny-pinching, and a host of other unpleasant traits. Despite his larger-than-life character, Finley often made wise decisions about corralling talented players for his rosters. For a few glory years, the players, many of a rebellious nature, meshed well on and off the field. (Turbow quotes pitcher Blue Moon Odom that to join Finley’s roster, “you have to pass the crazy test. You fill out that application—are you crazy? If the answer is no, we don’t want you.”) The narrative benefits immensely from Turbow’s many interviews with the long-retired players from the Athletics’ dominant stretch. A cast of characters section provides information about the post-baseball careers of the members of this particular dynasty, including such well-known names as Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers (Reggie Jackson: “We call him ‘buzzard’ because he’s off in his own world. Nothing bothers him. Him and that handlebar mustache of his—he’s cool”). The dismantling of the team by the mercurial and seemingly illogical Finley introduces a down note to this rollicking sports adventure. When Finley died at age 77, few people from professional baseball attended the funeral.
A pleasing slice of baseball nostalgia that offers relevance to today’s game.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-30317-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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