by Maruchi Mendez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 2012
A sad, cautionary tale peppered with enough back stories to keep human-interest readers engaged.
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Mendez debuts with a poignant tribute to her son, a promising high school and college baseball star cut down by a heart defect.
Joy, anguish and baseball fill the pages of this memoir, a letter of sorts written by Mendez to her youngest child, Ramiro, aka Toti. It recounts the details of his 20 short years, from his illegal adoption as a newborn in Spain to his untimely death in Florida. Brought into the fold of a comfortably middle-class Cuban-American family, Toti was raised in Miami, where baseball “is not just a sport, it is a religion and a culture.” He had the talent, the drive and the parental commitment to go all the way; he garnered headlines, won trophies and titles, and was on the radar of professional scouts. All that suddenly came to an end on April 2, 2000, when he collapsed and died only weeks after being diagnosed with previously undetected cardiomyopathy. Given to occasional flights of sentimental revelry, Mendez nonetheless articulately captures the extraordinary closeness and mutual devotion between mother and son. She offers a unique, inside view into the rigors, sacrifices and obsessions that define the buildup to a career in major league baseball. Along the way, she also shares a complicated family saga that includes her own childhood escape from Cuba—a move that took her family from wealth to poverty—her two marriages, her two troubled older sons, and a daughter and granddaughters that have given her reason to push forward. These days, Mendez spends much of her time fighting for more stringent mandatory medical testing for high school athletes to detect the kind of hidden abnormalities that took Toti’s life. Perhaps the most surprising revelation is that Toti never knew he was adopted, despite the fact he entered a family that had three older siblings, all of whom were sworn to secrecy.
A sad, cautionary tale peppered with enough back stories to keep human-interest readers engaged.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-1935806301
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Reedy Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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