Like all fine sports biographies, this one is not merely about an athlete. It is the story of an extraordinary and quite human man who happened to play baseball. Falkner's (The Short Season, 1986, etc.) literate, balanced account strives to get to the facts behind the Jackie Robinson legend, even when it hurts. An outstanding high school athlete, Robinson had repeated scrapes with the law during his teen years in California and was a member of a youth gang. A football star at UCLA, he quit just prior to graduation in 1941 to play semi-pro baseball, basketball, and football. A cloud hangs over his military career, when he was often involved in racial incidents, especially his court martial at Ft. Hood, Tex., for a Rosa Parkslike incident on a bus (he was acquitted). When Branch Rickey signed him to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947, both men knew they had a fight on their hands. The press, the public, and many in baseball vilified them, and Robinson had to endure continuous torment. But the deal was contingent on his vow to remain silent and not fight back. Falkner adequately recounts Robinson's storied career, but he focuses more on the man off the field and how he coped with pressure and fame. Unexpectedly interesting is Falkner's examination of Robinson's life after retiring from baseball in 1956. Named by Roy Wilkins to chair the NAACP's Freedom Fund, Robinson soon found himself to be a rarity: a politically conservative black celebrity. He stunned everyone by supporting Richard Nixon in his 1960 presidential campaign and, later, by going to work for New York's Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. His public confrontations with Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell came, ironically, at about the time he was inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame in honor of his historic, groundbreaking career. Intricately detailed and perceptively digressive, Falkner's work is as good as the best books by Donald Honig or Roger Kahn. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79336-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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