How baseball turns boys into men, and vice versa, considered with feeling and a bittersweet edge.
Baseball maven Stanton’s sentimental The Final Season (2000) earned him an invitation to speak during induction week at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here, he recounts that event—and a lot more.
It was in 1972 that 11-year-old Tom first began badgering his father to take him and older brother Joey to Cooperstown, New York, because “our team,” the Detroit Tigers, was in a dogfight for the American League pennant. The recurrence of their mother’s brain tumor and subsequent surgery, however, put the trip off indefinitely. After that, Stanton recalls, “We were always going to go there sometime, but the sometimes ran out.” Some 29 years later, however, Tom gets the call and invites Dad—now in his 80s but still capable of reciting entire genealogies of Tiger players—to drive out from Michigan along with Joey. The journey begins and ends with random but vivid flashbacks triggered by each Stanton in turn, as Cooperstown becomes an allegory for anticipation. Baseball is the theme, of course, but the author uses affinity for the game as a matrix for probing the male bond, belatedly comprehending the vast depth of parental love, examining the roots of pride and accomplishment, and even expiating (then resurrecting) sibling rivalry. As they tour Cooperstown’s museum, nostalgia and myth bubble up, interweave, and are sometimes amended: Babe Ruth, it turns out, was not an orphan; Abner Doubleday was away at West Point around the time the game was perfected; Ty Cobb actually wore sheepskin sliding pads! Homeward bound, the Stantons’ constant gentle banter on who best remembers what really happened eventually subsides into tacit realization that this, their first-ever overnight trip together, is also their last.
How baseball turns boys into men, and vice versa, considered with feeling and a bittersweet edge.Pub Date: June 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30350-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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