With acumen, Knight delivers an elegant précis of a baseball team’s season, and you don’t have to be a Dodgers fan to enjoy...
A searching portrait of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2013 season, from ESPN Magazine writer Knight.
When the Guggenheim Partners purchased the Dodgers in mid-2012, they paid $2.15 billion for a fixer-upper ball club with a ramshackle stadium to match, its concrete bones as osteoporotic as those of Fenway Park and Wrigley Field. But the firm’s deep pockets would help turn the Dodgers around, on the field, in the front office, in mood, in chemistry, and in paying big for stellar talent. It wouldn’t buy them a World Series, that year or the next, but the talent made for an exciting season, which Knight chronicles with style and discernment. She knows the science of the game, its strange geometry and freakish physics, as well as its history and etiquette. She knows the patois, and she administers it discriminately: a pitch’s deception, the “lack of sock in his swing.” Knight also understands the giddiness and awe experienced by fans throughout the season; each new day is cause for hope, with each blunder—and loss—causing a great ache. Many personalities emerge as the season progresses—e.g., pitching great Clayton Kershaw and odd fellow Yasiel Puig, so culturally oblivious that he “hailed from Cuba but he may as well have been from Mars,” albeit a Martian adept at “smacking home runs and gunning down runners and generally playing like an inspired maniac fans couldn’t take their eyes off.” There’s also general manager Ned Colletti, who “preferred cowboy boots to calculators”—so much for analytics—and “refused to suffer coddled ballplayers.” Throughout the book, the author offers interesting nuggets for baseball fans, from gamesmanship to the bravery of closers to the stage 4 cancer a fat salary or ego can inflict on the clubhouse.
With acumen, Knight delivers an elegant précis of a baseball team’s season, and you don’t have to be a Dodgers fan to enjoy it.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7629-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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