by Richard Bradley ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2008
Bradley provides entertainment aplenty, though nostalgic baseball fans and Yanks/Sox diehards will reap the greatest benefit.
Yet another chronicle of the epic New York/Boston rivalry, this time focusing on the legendary one-game playoff for the Eastern Division championship in 1978.
While the current generation of baseball fans may view the epic Red Sox comeback of 2004 as the pinnacle of the long-running Yankees/Sox drama, their acrimonious history has produced numerous other memorable matchups, not the least of which was the Oct. 2, 1978, game to break a first-place tie and determine which team would advance to the playoffs and take on the Kansas City Royals for a shot at the World Series. Within his pitch-by-pitch recreation of the blockbuster duel, Bradley (Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University, 2005, etc.) flashes back to various points throughout the season, telling the individual stories of players involved in the game. Controversial superstars like Reggie Jackson, all-stars including Jim Rice, Ron Guidry and Carl Yastrzemski, and lesser-known players, such as hero-of-the-day Bucky Dent, get mini biographies. At a time when the Curse of the Bambino still loomed large, the author amply conveys Red Sox desperation, embodied in passionate team leader Carlton Fisk and nearly every player’s stated desire to win one for the aging Yastrzemski. There’s little question that the cast of characters—including overbearing Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, fiery manager Billy Martin and tough-as-nails catcher Thurman Munson, who would tragically perish in a plane crash less than a year later—warrants an in-depth chronicle, and Bradley’s anecdotal style is perfectly suited to relating the boys-club (mis)adventures of both teams. The author overreaches, however, in his attempts to turn an important baseball game into a transcendent moment in history; the moment-by-moment recounting becomes tedious by the seventh-inning stretch.
Bradley provides entertainment aplenty, though nostalgic baseball fans and Yanks/Sox diehards will reap the greatest benefit.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3438-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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