A book for any baseball fan to cherish.
The celebrated sportswriter circles the bases, calling out exceptional moments in the history of the game.
“Henry Aaron’s 715th home run is the most magical moment in baseball history,” writes Posnanski, author of The Baseball 100. It’s a tall claim, but it holds up, illustrating Aaron’s quiet resistance to White hatred and proving his repeated claim that in baseball, “All that matters is if you can play.” There are plenty of other noteworthy events in Posnanski’s pages—and well more than 50, in fact: He counts 108, coincidentally the number of stitches in a standard ball and number of years between Chicago Cubs championships. Some of the moments are well known, such as Babe Ruth’s calling the home run he was about to hit. Others are buried deep in baseball lore, including an appearance on the mound by Jackie Mitchell, a young woman who just so happened to strike Ruth out at an exhibition bout after Ruth loudly proclaimed that women were “too delicate” for the game. One of Posnanski’s winning ploys is to dig into the archives to find such hidden gems and especially to celebrate the mediocre players who, for one of those magical moments, pulled something out of their caps and hit a surprise homer—as with Bartolo Colón, the 42-year-old portly pitcher who smacked one out of the park and then took so long to round the bases that one announcer was moved to explain, charitably, “I think that’s how fast he runs.” Other of Posnanski’s diamond heroes, famed and obscure, have more hustle, including 15-year-old Joe Nuxhall, who pitched for the Cincinnati Reds when the grown-ups were fighting in World War II; J.L. Wilkinson, who introduced lights and night games to the field by way of the old Negro League; and Ichiro Suzuki, the ever smiling Mariner—“Has there ever been a more joyous player than Ichiro?”—who showed what love of the game is all about.
A book for any baseball fan to cherish.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780593472675
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.
Famed for such chillers as “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, Jackson reveals a warm, witty side in her voluminous correspondence.
There’s still an edge to the hilarious domestic vignettes she sends her parents, clearly the raw material for the now less famous magazine pieces collected in Life Among the Savagesand Raising Demons: Tending to four rambunctious children while cranking out the magazine pieces and novels on which the family income depended was a perennial challenge. Husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, a professor at Bennington for most of his career, never made much money, and his urgings to Jackson to get back to work form a disquieting undercurrent to the generally cheerful letters. The earliest letters are her lovestruck missives to Hyman when both were students at Syracuse University, but an angry letter from 1938 reveals a darker side to their relationship, delineated in more explicit detail 22 years later. Her anguish over his unrepentant womanizing and habit of demeaning her in public while ignoring her in private makes a heartbreaking counterpoint to delightful portraits of family activities that also ring true but tell only part of the story. The dark side so evident in Jackson’s fiction is kept for her work, but we see its origins in a 1938 letter to Hyman declaring, “you know my rather passive misanthropic tendencies, and how i [sic] hate this whole human race as a collection of monsters.” Jackson’s avoidance of capital letters adds to her correspondence’s charmingly idiosyncratic flavor, though she adheres to more conventional punctuation in letters to her agents Bernice Baumgarten and Carol Brandt, which offer candid snapshots of a working writer’s life. Later letters chronicle without self-pity the years of declining physical and emotional health that preceded her untimely death at age 48 in 1965.
A vivid, engaging, and engrossing collection from one of American literature’s great letter writers.Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13464-1
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A memoir of vivid detail and understandable ambivalence.
The bassist for Prince during the Purple Rain era provides glimpses into the kingdom.
BrownMark—who was born Mark Brown in 1962—describes his rise from a single-parent home in a city of racial discrimination (Minneapolis) to success with the musical supernova. Yet there were plenty of bumps along the way. For example, in 1982, even a big raise only brought his salary to $425 per week; later, he quit after discovering that his Purple Rain Tour bonus that he’d imagined might be $1.5 million was in fact only $15,000. Those looking for a memoir awash in sex, drugs, and the seamier sides of Prince’s private life will instead discover hard work and rigid discipline under a stern taskmaster, an artist who became what he was through minute attention to detail as well as genius. The author ably chronicles his own life growing up Black in a city so White he thought of it as a “Scandinavian Mecca.” As a boy, his family didn’t have a TV, and his early experiences playing music involved a makeshift guitar constructed out of a shoe box and rubber bands. Before he auditioned for Prince, he had never been to the suburbs, and before he joined the band, he had never been on a plane. His life changed dramatically at a time when the world of music was changing, as well. Disco was breaking down walls between Black and White, and punk was bringing a new edge and urgency. As Prince’s star was ascending, he demanded the full spotlight and resented any response his young bassist was generating. The author left the band in the mid-1980s feeling that he lived “in a world of filth, greed, and deception.” Still, the connections and impressions he made as a member of The Revolution launched his career, and he notes that “working with Prince was like going to the finest music school in the land.” One of Kirkus and Rolling Stone’s Best Music Books of 2020.
A memoir of vivid detail and understandable ambivalence.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0927-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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