Baseball fans will savor DiMaggio’s views about Ted Williams, Pete Rose, and many other famous players; Marilyn Monroe fans...
A remembrance of the baseball great’s final decade, from his friend and doctor.
The relationship between Joe DiMaggio (1914-1999) and podiatrist Rock Positano—a professor at Weill Cornell Medical Center and director of the Joe DiMaggio Sports Medicine Foot and Ankle Center—began in 1990 with a medical referral. As a star outfielder with the New York Yankees and during later decades as a global celebrity, DiMaggio experienced constant pain from a bone spur in his heel. Positano got drafted to treat the ailment when he was 32 and DiMaggio was 76. A friendship seemed unlikely, partly because doctors and patients rarely bond socially but mainly because DiMaggio was famously private about his personal life—with good reason given the countless celebrity seekers who worshipped professional baseball players, not to mention the former husband of Marilyn Monroe. However, as the author writes, he became one of DiMaggio’s few confidants regarding his two failed marriages, his troubled son from his first marriage, the baseball people he respected and disrespected, his political beliefs, his distress at individuals who failed to dress properly or show old-fashioned courtesy, and much more. For readers who already admire DiMaggio, Positano’s overly celebratory memoir will have much to offer. For others, the presentation may be grating, as the author’s name-dropping never ceases, and the sections that explore DiMaggio’s mean streak and inflexibility are diluted by Positano’s interjections of the great man’s virtues. “Accompanying him to all sorts of events,” writes the author, “I saw a stunning array of famous, rich, powerful people who were in awe of him and wanted to get close to him. The intensity of their admiration surprised me.”
Baseball fans will savor DiMaggio’s views about Ted Williams, Pete Rose, and many other famous players; Marilyn Monroe fans will find less of interest. As for other potential readers, the appeal will be limited.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5684-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
