The pitcher who served up Bobby Thomson’s 1951 pennant-winning homerun, the legendary “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” spins yarns from a bygone era when baseball was still king.
Baseball, by virtue of its place of prominence in early American sporting culture and its gently rhythmic, almost lackadaisical pace of play, has long been a prime conduit for nostalgia-driven memoirs. Branca, ably assisted by veteran co-author Ritz (Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King, 2011, etc.), adds another chapter to that collective oeuvre, chronicling his days pitching for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the team’s heyday, when trailblazing Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier and “dem Bums” were one of three storied New York franchises (along with the Yankees and Thomson’s Giants) who dominated the Major Leagues. Rather than a prototypical tale of overcoming inner demons or rising above childhood poverty, however, the author offers a kinder, gentler tale, which starts with a loving and supportive family and concludes not with the crowning achievement of a World Series triumph, but rather with a crushing failure—the aforementioned “Shot”—followed by a gradual decline into mediocrity. Branca does, however, remove some luster from Thomson’s historic homer by detailing how the rival Giants used a high-powered telescope to steal other teams’ signs, an ignominious stain on an otherwise remarkable season of baseball that is well documented in Joshua Prager’s masterful The Echoing Green (2006). Despite the circumstances, Branca evinces little bitterness: He married the girl of his dreams, enjoyed post-career success as an insurance salesman and even got some merchandising mileage out of a friendship with Thomson that developed years after their careers had ended. Like a ballpark frank, it might be a little overdone, and some bits might be tough to swallow, but you can’t help but enjoy it.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3687-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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