An unsentimentally revealing biography of the legendary black pitcher, and a history of the catch-as-catch-can Negro leagues where he first flourished. Drawing on a variety of sources, Ribowsky (He's A Rebel, Slick) does a fine job of separating fact from fancy in his tellingly detailed account of the life and times of Leroy Robert (Satchel) Paige (whose nickname derived from a youthful bent for snatching valises from unwary travelers). Born in Mobile, Alabama (circa 1906), Paige polished his diamond talents while incarcerated as an adolescent offender. Released from prison toward the end of 1923, he began an extended career that took him the length and breadth of the US as well as to Latin America's capital cities. In addition to playing the so-called blackball circuit (with Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, et al.), the gangly hurler more than held his own on barnstorming tours in head-to-head competition against such white stars as Dizzy Dean, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Feller. Eventually signed by Bill Veeck's Cleveland Indians, Paige had five respectable seasons in the majors, pitched in a World Series game, and later became the first black inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame. While the public bought Paige's act as a lovable, colorful eccentric with a golden arm, Ribowsky makes clear that his persona masked a decidedly darker side that invariably wore out his welcome wherever he stayed. A compulsive womanizer and hard- drinking night owl (to the end of his days), Paige was a past master at looking out for number one, jumping contracts, and holding out for more money as a proven drawing card. Ribowski's first-rate take on the national pastime brings to vivid life what Paige and his contemporaries accomplished on their Jim Crow field of dreams. (16 pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-77674-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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