An unassuming yet refreshingly commanding memoir.
New York Mets pitcher Dickey delivers a winsome, well-scripted autobiography.
From humble beginnings in Nashville to a current multimillion-dollar salary with the Mets, the author writes enthusiastically about a life full of twists and turns. Ably assisted by New York Daily News reporter Coffey (The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team, 2005, etc.), Dickey colorfully describes being raised in the 1980s with little money by two distant parents—though his father instilled in him a love of baseball. Buoyed by baseball, Star Wars and Bible study in his teens, Dickey overcame traumatic childhood sexual abuse by a babysitter and his middle school’s corporal punishment for back talk. A sports obsession soon took priority over everything, including concerns about his mother’s alcoholism. After a stellar career at the University of Tennessee, he began an ascent up the sporting ranks as a high draft pick for the Texas Rangers in 1996, even though his $810,000 signing bonus was drastically reduced once a team-ordered physician discovered his elbow was missing a ligament. His conversation with famed knuckle-ball master Tim Wakefield and the evolution of his trademarked game-changing knuckle ball are just a few of the book’s many highlights. Through the various life and career uncertainties, he and longtime wife Anne leaned on their Christian faith for support, something that Dickey references often without becoming preachy or heavy-handed.
An unassuming yet refreshingly commanding memoir.Pub Date: March 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15815-5
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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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