by Monte Irvin with James A. Riley ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1996
An inspiring if static firsthand account of a celebrated baseball career, coauthored by Riley, an authority on the Negro Leagues. Irvin has a right to be proud; he also has a gift for being humble. Born in 1919, one of 13 children, Irvin recounts with equal nostalgia both the dire poverty of his early years on an Alabama farm and his relatively stable later childhood in northern New Jersey. He also details fondly the great sacrifices and support provided by his parents. This ingratiating lack of self- consciousness extends to his descriptions of fellow Hall of Famers Josh Gibson (``without a doubt the greatest hitter I ever saw, black or white'') and Jackie Robinson (``a tremendous, well-rounded athlete'' though ``it seemed like he thought he was just a little bit better than other players''). He makes no bones about how the ``gentleman's agreement'' barring black players from the game robbed him of his prime. However, he evenhandedly remembers the good times and camaraderie of Negro League road trips, as well as a few kindnesses extended by whites who risked severe reprisal for their generosity. Irvin entered the Major Leagues with the New York Giants in 1950. Though well past his peak as an athlete, he helped pace the team to two pennants and one World Series win while also serving as mentor to a young centerfielder of unworldly talent named Willie Mays. Beginning in the mid-'50s, Monte worked in the baseball commissioner's office, and he serves up some pointed commentary about the game's evolution, opining about contract arbitration (which ``has really hurt baseball more than anything else'') and the designated-hitter rule (``Pitchers can be very aggressive . . . because they never have to come to the plate''), among other controversial topics. Never one to intellectualize needlessly, Irvin has a tempered approach to baseball that will be tonic against those who attempt to make the game more complex and ``meaningful'' than it really is.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-7867-0254-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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