Though somewhat elementary in places, a sensitive work that celebrates even as it demythologizes.
The bittersweet tale of San Pedro de Macorís, the struggling Dominican town that has sent 79 players to the Major Leagues since the early 1960s.
Prolific nonfiction author Kurlansky (The Food of a Younger Land, 2009, etc.) sails smoothly into the bay of baseball, despite a few anchor drops into superfluity (e.g., explanations of a sacrifice bunt and a switch-hitter). Nonetheless, the author tells a compelling, multifaceted story. He sketches the history of the island that the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti, examines little-known cultural contributions of the Dominicans and explores the various economic forces that have driven, and sunk, San Pedro over the years, including fishing, sugar cane, tourism and, throughout much of the last century, baseball. He even finds time for some local recipes, inserting them here and there as he did in his bestselling book Cod (1997). Kurlansky examines the careers of some of the region’s most notable stars, including Julio Franco, Juan Marichal, George Bell and Sammy Sosa, who was tarnished by the steroid scandal. The author notes how returning MLB players remain life-long celebrities in a town where many struggle to eke out a subsistence-level living from seasonal work in sugar cane harvesting or in even less remunerative occupations. The author also looks at the sprawling baseball culture in the town, which features three-dozen fields, scouts, training schools and academies and numerous local teams, including the eponymous and perennial also-ran Eastern Stars. Alert to the cultural and racial problems in the United States, Kurlansky razes the nasty edifice of the “hot-blooded Latin” stereotype and notes that Dominican players continue to suffer from a plethora of prejudices. Of course, he effectively addresses the principal question—why San Pedro? The answer seems both simple and heartbreaking: Baseball is hope.
Though somewhat elementary in places, a sensitive work that celebrates even as it demythologizes.Pub Date: April 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-750-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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