A sometimes-scattershot but lively account for MLB fans.
A former Major League Baseball pitcher offers anecdotes and surprisingly candid gossip.
Unlike most MLB players, Darling (Game 7, 1986: Failure and Triumph in the Biggest Game of My Life, 2016, etc.) not only graduated from college; he attended an Ivy League university. At Yale, he began as a position player before becoming a pitcher, and then he worked his way through the minor leagues to star for the New York Mets from 1983 to 1991 (he later played for the Expos and the Athletics, retiring in 1995). He is now a broadcaster for the Mets along with former teammate and author Keith Hernandez. The loose organizing principle of his latest book is reminiscences of the players, managers, coaches, and team owners with whom Darling interacted during his years as a player. The majority of the anecdotes are positive. However, unlike many baseball memoirists, Darling portrays some of his colleagues in negative ways based on their observed behaviors both on and off the field. Lenny Dykstra receives especially harsh treatment. Dwight Gooden, the brilliant pitcher, receives both praise and searing criticism for squandering his talent in a haze of substance abuse (ditto Darryl Strawberry). Some lower-profile players receive multiple pages of adoration, such as veteran pitcher Al Jackson, who unselfishly served as Darling’s on-field mentor. “We weren’t friends—ours was very much a mentor-mentee type of relationship. I don’t think we ever went out for a beer after a game. But I enjoyed Al’s company immensely. He was all business, all the time, but there was a soft, sweet side to his personality.” The anecdotes come and go so quickly that the book is probably best read a few pages at a time. In later chapters, Darling reflects on becoming a broadcaster, which offers a different perspective on the game, and gives opinions about the current game.
A sometimes-scattershot but lively account for MLB fans.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18438-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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