Fine, tasty fare for dedicated baseball fans.
A former senior editor for Sports Illustrated returns with a highly detailed account of a bizarre 1979 game between the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs: The final score, in 10 innings, was 23-22.
In this comprehensive narrative, nothing gets by Cook (Electric October: Seven World Series Games, Six Lives, Five Minutes of Fame that Lasted Forever, 2017, etc.). After a bit of background and history—the two teams, baseball in general, Wrigley Field—the author takes us through 20 swift chapters, each devoted to a half-inning of this weird game at Wrigley on May 17, 1979. In each chapter, he focuses on a player or two—or a manager—and provides a brief biography and a discussion of how he ended up at Wrigley that day. Many of the names will be familiar even to casual baseball fans: Bill Buckner, Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt, Tim McCarver, Dave Kingman; others, not so much, except to fans of the teams or to devoted fans of the game—e.g., Jerry Martin, Bill Caudill, Ray Burris. Cook weaves their stories in and out of the narrative, thereby enriching his well-researched tale as he proceeds. Following the last out in the 10th, the author concludes with explorations of what happened to the teams and to some of the principals afterward. We learn more about Buckner’s famous error in the 1986 World Series, Pete Rose’s fall from grace (gambling), and catcher Bob Boone’s remarkable family (his sons played in the major league as well). But the most disturbing story involves Cubs’ reliever Donnie Moore: He was a talented pitcher but was a serial abuser of his wife; his abuse grew grotesquely grim when, in a rage in 1989, he shot her several times (she survived) before killing himself.
Fine, tasty fare for dedicated baseball fans.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18203-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
Rhimes said “yes” to sharing her insights. Following her may not land you on the cover of a magazine, but you’ll be glad you...
The queen of Thursday night TV delivers a sincere and inspiring account of saying yes to life.
Rhimes, the brain behind hits like Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, is an introvert. She describes herself as a young girl, playing alone in the pantry, making up soap-opera script stories to act out with the canned goods. Speaking in public terrified her; going to events exhausted her. She was always busy, and she didn’t have enough time for her daughters. One Thanksgiving changed it all: when her sister observed that she never said “yes” to anything, Rhimes took it as a challenge. She started, among other things, accepting invitations, facing unpleasant conversations, and playing with her children whenever they asked. The result was a year of challenges and self-discovery that led to a fundamental shift in how she lives her life. Rhimes tells us all about it in the speedy, smart style of her much-loved TV shows. She’s warm, eminently relatable, and funny. We get an idea of what it’s like to be a successful TV writer and producer, to be the ruler of Shondaland, but the focus is squarely on the lessons one can learn from saying yes rather than shying away. Saying no was easy, Rhimes writes. It was comfortable, “a way to disappear.” But after her year, no matter how tempting it is, “I can no longer allow myself to say no. No is no longer in my vocabulary.” The book is a fast read—readers could finish it in the time it takes to watch a full lineup of her Thursday night programing—but it’s not insubstantial. Like a cashmere shawl you pack just in case, Year of Yes is well worth the purse space, and it would make an equally great gift.
Rhimes said “yes” to sharing her insights. Following her may not land you on the cover of a magazine, but you’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7709-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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