Despite the tawdry ending, Montville clearly had fun creating a playful buzz of words to raise the ghost of The Splendid...
Snazzy biography of The Kid that manages to be subtly characterful and thorough at the same time.
This portrait of baseball legend Theodore Samuel Williams (1918–2002) is sweeping and sweet, the images coming at the reader like jump-cuts to catch a moment or a tone. As he deserves, Williams gets double-barreled treatment. He was, Montville (At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt, 2001, etc.) makes plain, a self-centered, willful motor-mouth with a penchant for rococo, profane poetry whose temper and un-sportsmanlike antics kept him at loggerheads with Red Sox fans. He also could swing a bat like no other and gave his spark to the comfort and pleasure of kids. The author’s Beantown background (he was formerly sports columnist at the Globe) gives him access to all manner of Boston characters, from mayors, university presidents, and Harvard’s athletic director to broadcasters, coaches, batboys, and Williams’s brother’s son, for starters. Their reminiscences almost always lift Williams out of one morass or another he has gotten himself into with his penchant to shoot from the hip. Most beguiling is Montville’s delineation of Williams’s incandescent relationship with the Boston press corps, particularly the likes of Dave Egan, Austen Lake, and Huck Finnegan, reminding us that words, in the paper and on the radio, were how people related to sports in the age before TV. The text also covers three marriages, lasting unmarried love with Louise Kaufman, and his children. Williams’s military service in WWII and Korea seems simple in comparison. It all ends with a bump and a thud and a lot of ice when Williams’s son John-Henry has his father’s remains frozen, the coup de grâce in a long string of opportunistic acts.
Despite the tawdry ending, Montville clearly had fun creating a playful buzz of words to raise the ghost of The Splendid Splinter.Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50748-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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