In a baseball memoir filled with plenty of strikes and balls, Rose offers abundant evidence of why he has become a...
One of the most talented—and controversial—players in the history of Major League Baseball shares his life story.
When Rose (b. 1941) set his on-field records during the 1970s and ’80s, he became famous for his high-energy performances as well as his tough-guy brashness. He opens the book by noting, “my dad taught me that nothing mattered more than winning.” Later, he earned a different sort of renown: for his gambling on the outcomes of games, which led to the sport’s commissioner banning Rose from the game. So far, the ban has blocked his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Based solely on performance, Rose, the game’s all-time hits leader, is one of the most deserving Hall of Fame candidates in history, and controversy about whether his apparently victimless gambling should prohibit his entry might never end. The author addresses his gambling and the ban it yielded in a few pages toward the end of the book, and the tone of those pages is difficult to characterize; it’s a cryptic tumble of sentences that is half apology and half defiance. As for the remainder of the book, Rose builds the explanation of his successes and his quirks around the influence of his father, who held a day job in Cincinnati but became best known locally for his semiprofessional athletic prowess. Over and over the author describes how his father emphasized winning for the team no matter the physical and emotional costs. From his early childhood, Rose felt confident that he would reach professional baseball even though the odds are extremely slim for anyone. Unfortunately, the narrative is marred by an absurd amount of repetition regarding the author’s macho nature and his immodesty about his hard-won skills. But when he tones down the attitude, his recollections about baseball—and life off the field—yield rewards for readers.
In a baseball memoir filled with plenty of strikes and balls, Rose offers abundant evidence of why he has become a touchstone of controversy.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55867-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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