Plenty of baseball for the fan, but even more insight into why Aaron matters beyond the game.
An eye-opening biography of the Braves’ outfielder, the real home-run king.
Though he retired as the all-time leader in RBIs and total bases, Henry Aaron was “never supposed to be the guy” who ran down the game’s most cherished record: Babe Ruth’s career 714 home runs. Known for his durability and his amazingly strong wrists, which allowed him to wait until the last millisecond on a pitch, the never-flashy Aaron remains, if there can be such a thing, an underrated superstar. ESPN senior writer Bryant (Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, 2005, etc.) attributes this oversight to Aaron’s background and demeanor, to a press insistent on its own agenda and blithely unaware of its prejudice and to the frightful mental and spiritual toll exacted from this black man from the South as he overtook the Babe. The author pays close attention to Aaron’s baseball career, from the early days through to his curtain call as a designated hitter for the Brewers. If we never come to know the introverted Aaron, Bryant allows us, at least, to understand him, keenly evoking the social environments that shaped the man. Although sportswriters frequently compared him to Willie Mays—with whom he seems to have had a somewhat peevish relationship—the non-confrontational, quiet, poorly educated Aaron ached to emulate Jackie Robinson and wanted desperately to be recognized for more than merely “hate mail and home runs.” Applying the single-mindedness that made him such a great player, Aaron reached the Braves’ front office—the first black ex-major-leaguer making decisions for the home club—and enjoyed business success selling cars. Baseball’s tainted steroid era has, if anything, bestowed an even brighter shine to Aaron’s on-field achievements, but Bryant makes clear that this slugger’s story was always about more than merely overcoming blazing fastballs.
Plenty of baseball for the fan, but even more insight into why Aaron matters beyond the game.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-42485-4
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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