A sensitive look at the cultural impact of the man who once was “the face of Judaism in America.”
A veteran sportswriter fondly recalls the life of “the greatest Jewish ballplayer of all time.”
While not the first Jew to play major league baseball—and Sandy Koufax fans will argue he wasn’t the greatest—Hank Greenberg (1911–1986) was the first to succeed spectacularly, paving the way for Jews in the national pastime as Jackie Robinson did for African-Americans. In this cradle-to-grave biography, Rosengren (Journalism/Univ. of Minnesota; Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid, 2008, etc.) pays particular attention to Greenberg’s playing days, to his towering achievements in the game, to the 47-month chunk of his prime lost to World War II and to his later career as a baseball executive. We learn, as well, about the man: his devotion to his parents, his tireless work ethic, his modesty, his short fuse and his popularity with the ladies. Though not especially devout, the “Jewish Babe Ruth” famously refused to play on Yom Kippur in 1934, a decision that simultaneously chanced the ridicule of gentiles and signaled to Jews that tradition need not be wholly sacrificed to assimilation. The slugger fully understood his symbolic role, the feature of Greenberg’s story that most clearly engages Rosengren. During this feared hitter’s heyday—a time when Hitler assumed power in Germany, when the KKK thrived in America’s South, Detroit’s own Henry Ford was the nation’s best known anti-Semite, “an age when Jews were considered weak, unathletic and impotent,”—Greenberg emerged as a powerful figure, an accomplished and unapologetic ethnic standard-bearer. Rosengren traces the steps toward Greenberg’s triumph, vividly reminding us of his hard-earned, path-breaking role.
A sensitive look at the cultural impact of the man who once was “the face of Judaism in America.”Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0451235763
Page Count: 400
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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