by Tim Wakefield with Tony Massarotti ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2011
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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