Veeck is not as well remembered as he should be. Dickson’s book is a skillful corrective.
Dickson (The Unwritten Rules of Baseball, 2009, etc.) delivers an engaging biography of Bill Veeck (1914–1986), an innovative, irascible and progressive gadfly within the staid world of baseball.
For six decades, from the 1930s to the ’80s, wherever baseball was played, talked about or voted on, Veeck was there. Born into baseball—his father had been president of the Chicago Cubs—Veeck would go on to own and run four baseball teams. In each case, he turned moribund franchises into fan favorites through promotions ranging from ingenious to silly, from exploding scoreboards to having a little person (a midget) take an at-bat—and much, much more. But he also had a keen eye for talent and produced winning teams—his Cleveland Indians won the World Series in 1948. Color was no barrier to Veeck, as he signed the first black player in the American League, Larry Doby, who would later become the second black manager in the big leagues. Off the field, he was a lifelong champion of civil rights and of political causes he thought right; he opposed the Vietnam War. All of this brought him fan adulation but fellow owners’ enmity, as his irreverent insistence that baseball might be fun seemed to threaten the sanctity of the game. Dickson suggests his progressive stance on race might have been the greater irritant: In 1950, the only black players in the American League were on Veeck’s Indians. Ever fast with a quip, Veeck returned the fire, once saying, “I’ve always felt that when most owners stick their heads in the sand, their brains are still showing.” Dickson expertly evokes Veeck’s populist, garrulous public persona, while at the same time showing the private pain he endured as a World War II injury caused him to have countless amputations of portions of his right leg, leading to deterioration and ruin of the rest of his body, but not his spirit.
Veeck is not as well remembered as he should be. Dickson’s book is a skillful corrective.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1778-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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