A pleasant, slight memoir with a happy ending.
The NPR Weekend Edition host offers an extended personal essay about his lifelong infatuation with the Chicago Cubs.
Even nonfans of Major League Baseball might know that the Cubs finally won the World Series this past October, a feat they hadn’t accomplished since 1908. For decades, fans and pundits spoke, often superstitiously, about the team’s curse. Simon (Unforgettable: A Son, a Mother and the Lessons of a Lifetime, 2015, etc.) is unquestionably a die-hard fan. “My politics, religion, and personal tastes change with whatever I learn from life,” he writes. “But being a Cubs fan is my nature, my heritage, and probably somewhere in my chromosomes. If you prick me, I’m quite sure I’ll bleed Cubby blue.” Over the years, the author bought into the myth that on the rare occasions when the Cubs were playing well, he needed to stay away from the stadium, TV broadcasts, and the radio play-by-play lest his attention would somehow cause the team to lose. Numerous devoted Cubs’ fans and baseball commentators have covered most of the material in this narrowly focused memoir. Occasionally, Simon delves into mostly forgotten Cubs’ history, such as the franchise’s slowness to hire black players after Jackie Robinson broke the sport’s racial barrier shortly after World War II. The author’s musings on the culture of Chicago and the overall nature of over-the-top sports fandom are more original and thus more enlightening. For example, Simon relates the saga of the Billy Goat Tavern, the legendary sports bar near Wrigley Field. The author is also informative about the commercial and cultural life that has developed near the stadium, an area eventually dubbed Wrigleyville. The author is a solid stylist, and his descriptions of Cubs’ players, managers, and owners resonate, as do his anecdotes about his wife and daughters as they try to understand his mania.
A pleasant, slight memoir with a happy ending.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1803-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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