Only a kid on the loose in a candy store would display more sheer joy than McGough at his great good luck.
A winsome little reminiscence of two years spent at the Bronx Zoo.
McGough had no connections to the New York Yankees organization when he sat down and wrote them for a job as batboy as he was about to enter his junior year in high school. But out of the blue he got the job, a plum for any young Yankees fan. Well, a plum until he found himself swabbing filthy sinks, shining shoes, gathering up dirty laundry, and lugging overstuffed trash bags leaking tobacco juice to the Dumpster. Still, it was a small price to pay for getting to know so many of his heroes, and most of them were real bricks to McGough, making him welcome and making him feel like a necessary cog in the great machine. Now a 29-year-old lawyer, the author writes with polish but manages to maintain a tone of innocence and awe in his narrative. Naturally, not all his time was spent rubbing shoulders with the players in the dugout, but a handful of stories relate adventures only someone in McGough’s unique position could experience. He got to drive a player’s car home from a Florida training camp and had amusingly thwarted encounters with college girls on spring break. He was ensnared in a pyramid scheme trying to cash in on box seats. He went on a couple of chaste dates with girls in the stands, lured by the pinstripes. By his second year, McGough was getting dumber rather than wiser. He concocted a scam to trade phony player autographs for CDs, and it backfired (though he didn’t get burned). Anyone who ever harbored an unmitigated distaste for the Yankees front office will be somewhat mollified by learning that the Yankee Foundation gave the author a critical $10,000 scholarship to attend Williams College.
Only a kid on the loose in a candy store would display more sheer joy than McGough at his great good luck.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51020-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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