Removed from perfect indeed, but all the more charming for it.
YA author Hoose (The Race to Save the Lord God Bird, 2004, etc.) recalls his youthful obsession with baseball and the profound impact of his casual friendship with a famous cousin who played for the Yankees.
Growing up in 1950s Indianapolis, the author loved nothing more than baseball. With the help of indulgent parents who subscribed to nearly every magazine about the sport, he quickly became the neighborhood expert, even fielding phone calls from his barber to settle arguments. Despite his voluminous knowledge, Hoose was dismayed by his lack of prowess on the field, where he was often the last one chosen. Just as he seemingly reached his pre-adolescent nadir, his father mentioned that he was related to none other than Don Larsen, a pitcher for the New York Yankees. The boy wrote to his second cousin about his struggles and received an encouraging note in return, setting in motion a long-distance relationship that would have a significant effect on Hoose’s life (though Larsen would only vaguely remember the details years later). Once word spread about his famous relation, he quickly became something of a local celebrity, especially after Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history, in 1956. Though it took place during school hours, Hoose managed to see a few innings thanks to a comically frantic arrangement with his mother, who rode his bike to school at lunchtime so that he could pedal it back home, eat while watching the game, then race back to school just in time for class. These idyllic remembrances perpetuate the pervading cliché that sport was a better, purer pursuit in the past. Hoose’s genuine passion for the game shines through, however, and the self-effacing descriptions of his boyhood troubles make you want to root, root, root for the kid with the big glasses and the wild arm.
Removed from perfect indeed, but all the more charming for it.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-8027-1537-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 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
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