A brisk account of a career and a culture that presages much of our current-day obsession with celebrity.
Roberts (History/Purdue Univ.) and Smith (American History/Georgia Tech Univ.) follow their previous collaboration (Blood Brothers: The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, 2016) with a hybrid book about baseball legend Mickey Mantle (1931-1995).
The hybrid consists of a spotty biography of Mantle’s journey from small-town Oklahoma to the New York Yankees, a deep dive into the nature of American-style celebrity, and fascinating cameos by the men and women who influenced the impressionable Mantle as he rose to fame. The authors suggest that the task of upholding Yankee hegemony while being compared to Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio placed unbearable pressures on the 20-something Mantle. Predisposed to late-night partying and excessive alcohol consumption, Mantle often struggled to report to the baseball diamond. The serious physical injuries wracking his seemingly godlike physique also compromised his ability to reach maximum performance on a regular basis. One year in particular, 1956, was his finest, as Mantle led Major League Baseball in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in—the almost never achieved triple crown. Though the authors recount the 1956 season in detail that might bore those uninterested in baseball history, their narrative of off-field controversies should have no trouble holding the interest of all readers. Most sports journalists and other baseball insiders covered up for the naïve Mantle, feeling that dishonesty by omission served their audiences’ desire for hero worship. After 1956, as Mantle’s stardom peaked and then declined, revelations about his less-than-sterling behaviors seeped out. The publication of Ball Four (1970), the classic memoir by pitcher Jim Bouton, ended any remaining illusion of Mantle as a golden boy. When Mantle died relatively young in 1995, few who knew the real Mantle expressed shock.
A brisk account of a career and a culture that presages much of our current-day obsession with celebrity.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-09442-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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