A refreshing sports biography that punctures common myths about one of baseball’s greats.
A new biography of Major League Baseball Hall of Famer Ernie Banks (1931-2015).
Sports journalist Rapoport (The Immortal Bobby: Bobby Jones and the Golden Age of Golf, 2005, etc.), who wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times for more than two decades, began his project as a collaborator with the baseball legend; however, after Banks died, the author decided to transform the intended autobiography into a biography. Banks is best known for his sterling play as a power-hitting shortstop, his nearly 20-year career with the hapless Chicago Cubs, and his eternally cheery outlook on baseball and life. Rapoport does not debunk the essential truths of those surface qualities, but he offers copious evidence that Banks was more complicated than most baseball fans know. Banks grew up as one of 12 children in Dallas, in a time of cruel racial segregation. Until he entered the Army in 1951 (he served in Germany during the Korean War) and then broke the color barrier on the Cubs two years later, he had no meaningful contact with open racism, leaving him deeply naïve about what he would face throughout his life. Intellectually curious and self-effacing, Banks may have lost his naiveté about racism, but he chose to avoid the crusader label. As a result, he faced a lifetime of puzzlement and occasional criticism for his refusal to speak out against segregation, especially from Chicagoans appalled by the virulent racism infecting the city. In his family life, Banks’ sunny disposition hid his eventual alienation from his parents, siblings, wives, and children. Despite the author’s periodic coverage of social issues, he devotes the bulk of the biography to baseball on the field and in the clubhouse. Dedicated baseball fans will appreciate Rapoport’s coverage of dozens of Cubs players, field managers, and executives, including the complicated Wrigley family owners. One of the book’s shortcomings is the author’s attempts to cram in too much information about seven decades of baseball, but that’s a minor quibble.
A refreshing sports biography that punctures common myths about one of baseball’s greats.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31863-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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