A jaggedly beautiful punk-rock sports tale.
Faded punk rockers and drug addicts on the mend try to get their lives together—by forming a baseball team, of course.
Sound familiar? Yes, but, fortunately, the scribe this time isn’t a professional journalist writing a quick inspirational-lite story about weekend ballplaying with his buddies, but, rather, Albert—serially troubled, a recovering alcoholic and an occasional screenwriter whose high points as a punk rocker in the Southern California scene were co-founding Christian Death and drumming for Bad Religion (before either achieved any sort of success). Now, sick of his going-nowhere life and aching for something that seems just a little bit more real, Albert and a coterie of buddies, plus randomly gathered strangers, form the Griffith Park Pirates and start playing games every Sunday. The team is a messy mélange of types that soon gets downsized to a hardcore contingent who “shared a similar background that consisted of slam dancing, weird haircuts, and too many drugs.” As in your average baseball tale, the focus isn’t on the sport itself—has any other recreational activity lent itself to so many analogies and metaphors?—but on what brings the players there and what keeps them going. Though Albert’s descriptions of the rough-and-tumble games are quite vividly entertaining in and of themselves—at least one rival team is composed mostly of young gang members, and at one game the umpires are off in the bushes doing crack—what really keeps the story going are Albert’s thoughtful portraits of these troubled souls. With the cinematic potential so rife here (underdog sports team and all), the reader keeps expecting a sublimely happy ending but grows quickly aware that this one won’t end with a single triumphant game. Instead, it ends simply with some hard-luck guys trying to keep their lives together despite addiction and constant failure.
A jaggedly beautiful punk-rock sports tale.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-4632-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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