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
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
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