Inspirational paint-by-numbers, but a worthy addition to the category of moving athlete memoirs.
Former Major League pitcher Abbott recounts the ups and downs of his career—and how he managed to succeed despite being born without a right hand.
Abbott’s athletic success was perpetually viewed through the lens of his disability. His achievements, while impressive, were deemed extraordinary relative to what the average one-handed person might expect to accomplish. Such judgment rankled the principled, hard-working lefty, however, as he recounts in this chronicle of his childhood growing up in hardscrabble Flint, Mich., and subsequent rise to the majors, where he pitched for the California Angels and New York Yankees (among others). Throughout his career, Abbott fought to be evaluated based not on his remarkable ingenuity and dexterity in learning to both pitch and field so well with one hand, but rather on the merits of what he achieved on the mound. He could not, however, fail to acknowledge his status as a hero to the disabled, a burden he willingly bore throughout his career. Overall, Abbott enjoyed a marginally successful pro career with a lifetime record of 87-108. He excelled for a few seasons and even threw a no-hitter in fabled Yankee Stadium, all after being one of the nation’s best college pitchers at the University of Michigan; he also won a gold medal in the 1988 Olympics. Still, as much as Abbott sought to be known solely as a pitcher rather than a one-handed pitcher, it’s impossible to contextualize his career without acknowledging the incredible odds he overcame. His retrospective is appropriately modest and self-effacing, and able co-author Brown punches up an inning-by-inning recap of the no-hitter, but there’s a predictability to the narrative that makes it somewhat less remarkable than it should be.
Inspirational paint-by-numbers, but a worthy addition to the category of moving athlete memoirs.Pub Date: April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-52325-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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