A strike for Sox fans; a passed ball for everyone else.
A sports autobiography as straightforward as its titular pitch is unpredictable.
Athletes often refer to themselves in the third person, but not usually for an entire book. Longtime Boston Red Sox pitcher Wakefield co-authors the story of his career with sports columnist Massarotti (co-author: Big Papi: My Story of Big Dreams and Big Hits, 2008, etc.), but the personal pronoun is completely absent. Despite that confusing setup, the narrative proceeds exactly as any knowledgeable baseball fan might expect, given that its subject is one of the game’s all-around good guys, a successful player somewhere between a journeyman and a star. Though a talented player in college, it quickly became apparent that Wakefield couldn’t hit well enough to make a Major League team. Fate intervened, however, when a Pittsburgh Pirates’ coach noticed him tossing knuckleballs in practice. Intrigued, he asked Wakefield to take a stab at pitching, which ultimately led to a near-historic first season in the majors, where he helped lead the Pirates to the brink of the World Series. The next couple of seasons proved far less charmed, however, and presaged the beginning of a career defined by peaks (a trade to the Red Sox and two subsequent World Series titles) and valleys (being shuffled back and forth between the starting rotation and the bullpen). Through it all, Wakefield’s team-first approach and unflagging effort made him a beloved player in Beantown, where he stands poised to take over the franchise lead in pitching victories in 2011 (assuming he stays healthy at the age of 45). Despite striving valiantly to capture the unique nature of the knuckleball and the alienation its practitioners face, the narrative fails to disclose much of interest about Wakefield beyond his athletic achievements—proving once again that nice guys might be able to shed cliché and finish first, but they don’t always make for enthralling subjects.
A strike for Sox fans; a passed ball for everyone else.Pub Date: April 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-51769-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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