bookshelf

IMPERFECT

Name: IMPERFECT
Author: Jim Abbott
ISBN: 978-0-345-52325-9

AN IMPROBABLE LIFE

by Jim Abbott & Tim Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2012

Inspirational paint-by-numbers, but a worthy addition to the category of moving athlete memoirs.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)