Despite the lack of polish, fans of America’s favorite pastime will enjoy this genial piece of baseball ephemera.
A nostalgic treat for lovers of baseball lore, this pictorial documentary scores big with its chronicle of a 1994 “Austrian Cup” that featured some of the sport’s most noteworthy icons.
Author/cameraman Reynolds extracted stills from hours of video footage to create a companion book to his in-production documentary, both of which relate the story of an exhibition game staged near Vienna during the strike-shortened 1994 season. It was one of baseball’s lowest points in its long history, and the timing was horrendous—the Montreal Expos were on a record run, Albert Belle of the Cleveland Indians had his sights on the Triple Crown and Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres stood poised to become the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams. With the cancellation of the World Series freeing them from managerial and broadcasting obligations, a lineup of aging greats accepted an invitation to play in Stockerau, a village near Vienna where enthusiasts built Austria’s first baseball field. On a chilly September afternoon, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Whitey Ford, Enos Slaughter, Joe Pignatano, Dell Alston, Ron LeFlore and others donned Yankee grays and, along with a few ringers, took the field against a far younger Austrian nine. The play-by-play of those 7 innings highlights a chronicle that opens with castle visits, a meeting with Vienna’s mayor and a performance by the Vienna Boys Choir, to whom the veterans taught “Take Me Out To The Ballgame.” These passages are pleasantly banal and endearing, with much tomfoolery, as seen in photographs of Rizzuto on a medieval rack and Ford conducting with a bat. The narrative, however, rife with incorrect grammar and misspellings, falls below the Mendoza line: Numerous passages take several readings to understand the author’s meaning or to whom he is referring. One figure named Karl is often mentioned but never introduced; a little research uncovered that he is Karl Hofer, the Austrian hotel executive who helped organize and promote the game. Still, one can’t help but feel the bittersweet joy of these Hall of Famers taking one last star turn on the diamond; of Slaughter and Rizzuto, both nearing 80, hitting run-scoring singles; and of exhausted men bursting from the dugout when LeFlore hits a home run.
Despite the lack of polish, fans of America’s favorite pastime will enjoy this genial piece of baseball ephemera.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 335
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
