The greatest Jewish baseball player since Sandy Koufax fuses sports autobiography with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
The moniker “average ballplayer” certainly did not apply to Green during his playing days. From his on-field exploits as a prolific slugger with a slender frame to his religion to his contemplative approach to the game, he defied categorization. In crafting his memoir, the author—with help from McAlpine (Mystery Box, 2003)—continues to flout convention. Rather than the standard post-retirement, paint-by-numbers tale of groupies and life on the road or addiction recovery and redemption, he offers an account of his philosophical approach to hitting, a method developed in response to a frustrating first few years in the big leagues. By developing a solitary routine that involved taking hundreds of swings off a tee, Green discovered a way to find inner stillness, to free his mind of distraction and focus on nothing but the act of hitting. The results were impressive: two All-Star appearances, a Silver Slugger award, and three top-10 finishes in MVP voting. The narrative describing the process and the insight that led to it, however, may not hit a home run with readers. Green’s a likable narrator, and his Eastern-tinged philosophical musings have merit, but it’s difficult to determine the intended audience. Baseball junkies will relish his discussion of how pitchers tip pitches, but are likely to tune out the Zen advice; Jewish fans looking for religious insight will be disappointed by their hero’s relatively secular worldview; and those seeking enlightenment aren’t likely to achieve a higher state of being by following the author’s recycled platitudes. Perfect for a semi-religious Jewish casual baseball fan in search of a Zen-lite guidebook…or maybe just Blue Jay, Dodger, Met and Diamondback fans who remember Green’s playing days fondly.
Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9119-4
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
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
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