Energetically written, but lacking in any revelations about this most enigmatic of sporting figureheads.
Vivacious biography of The Bambino that makes a gallant attempt to sort fact from fiction courtesy of some newly unearthed documents.
Former Sports Illustrated senior writer Montville (Ted Williams, 2004) sweeps readers back to more innocent times for baseball with this profile of a figure that looms large over the sport. Instead of pouring over gaps left in George Herman Ruth’s history, Montville focuses on the facts available to him, metaphorically referring to a “fog” that descends around Ruth whenever a path he takes in life turns into a dark alley. Some of Ruth’s impoverished early life in Baltimore remains frustratingly out of reach, although the author takes a stab at piecing it together. A fog falls often in the early pages of the book, around Ruth’s marriage to first wife Helen Woodward as well as his notoriously fractious relationship with his father. But it lifts gradually as Ruth rises to stardom, and Montville gleefully takes us on a dizzying journey through Ruth’s professional achievements, peppering them with tales of his notorious off-field behavior. While Ruth’s impressive stats propelled him into sporting history, his antics away from the public glare saw him develop a voracious appetite for women, alcohol and fast living, although his intellect remained at a shockingly stunted level of development; asked why he was reluctant to take a cut in salary by the Yankees as food riots raged in New York City during the Great Depression, Ruth simply responded that he didn’t know about the upheaval because no one had told him about it. Montville briefly touches on Ruth’s racial history as he delineates his aimless retirement years—was Ruth of African-American descent? Again, Montville’s fog descends, and another memoir of baseball’s biggest legend ends in a murky miasma.
Energetically written, but lacking in any revelations about this most enigmatic of sporting figureheads.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-51437-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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