Though somewhat elementary in places, a sensitive work that celebrates even as it demythologizes.
The bittersweet tale of San Pedro de Macorís, the struggling Dominican town that has sent 79 players to the Major Leagues since the early 1960s.
Prolific nonfiction author Kurlansky (The Food of a Younger Land, 2009, etc.) sails smoothly into the bay of baseball, despite a few anchor drops into superfluity (e.g., explanations of a sacrifice bunt and a switch-hitter). Nonetheless, the author tells a compelling, multifaceted story. He sketches the history of the island that the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti, examines little-known cultural contributions of the Dominicans and explores the various economic forces that have driven, and sunk, San Pedro over the years, including fishing, sugar cane, tourism and, throughout much of the last century, baseball. He even finds time for some local recipes, inserting them here and there as he did in his bestselling book Cod (1997). Kurlansky examines the careers of some of the region’s most notable stars, including Julio Franco, Juan Marichal, George Bell and Sammy Sosa, who was tarnished by the steroid scandal. The author notes how returning MLB players remain life-long celebrities in a town where many struggle to eke out a subsistence-level living from seasonal work in sugar cane harvesting or in even less remunerative occupations. The author also looks at the sprawling baseball culture in the town, which features three-dozen fields, scouts, training schools and academies and numerous local teams, including the eponymous and perennial also-ran Eastern Stars. Alert to the cultural and racial problems in the United States, Kurlansky razes the nasty edifice of the “hot-blooded Latin” stereotype and notes that Dominican players continue to suffer from a plethora of prejudices. Of course, he effectively addresses the principal question—why San Pedro? The answer seems both simple and heartbreaking: Baseball is hope.
Though somewhat elementary in places, a sensitive work that celebrates even as it demythologizes.Pub Date: April 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59448-750-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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