It is this historic perspective that will appeal to the diehard sports historian and to fans of old-time baseball.
An academic biography of one of the best-known figures in baseball history.
Denton Young was born in 1867 and began to play baseball semi-professionally while still in his teens. During one game in Canton, Ohio, he threw some fastballs that hit the fence so hard they tore off some boards. The local newspaper tagged Young “the Cyclone,” and eventually the shortened nickname stuck. For 22 years, the right-hander demonstrated a pitching skill that became legendary. Browning (History/Kenyon Coll.) relies on extensive written sources in order to give a historically placed picture of Young and his sport, although he is hampered by the fact that Young played before the advent of photojournalism and the development of sportswriting. His task was made all the more difficult by Young himself, who was an extremely private man even by the standards of his day. Browning writes about Young’s best games (including his famous perfect game of 1904) and describes Young (who for a time played and managed simultaneously) as a relentless innovator, continually experimenting and developing mastery over the fastball, curveball, change-up (known as the “slow ball”), and spitball. Russell also puts forward the arguments for and against declaring Young the greatest pitcher of all time (and the namesake of the major leagues’ pitching award): he won more games than anyone else (511 victories), after all, and he compiled more innings pitched than any other pitcher in baseball history (more than 7,350 innings). Browning’s dull prose, unfortunately, leaves much to be desired, but he does give an accurate (and fascinating) account of the development of baseball that took place during Young’s career. In 1890, for example, the pitcher would deliver from a marked-off rectangular box; by 1893, the pitching rubber had replaced the box and the pitching distance was lengthened; and in 1903, the foul strike rule was adopted.
It is this historic perspective that will appeal to the diehard sports historian and to fans of old-time baseball.Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55849-262-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
