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YANKEE MIRACLES

LIFE WITH THE BOSS AND THE BRONX BOMBERS

A treasure-trove for sentimental Yankees fans and a feel-good read for all baseball fans.

With the assistance of Cook (co-author: Another Season: A Coach's Story of Raising an Exceptional Son, 1997, etc.), longtime New York Yankees employee Negron (One Last Time: Good-bye to Yankee Stadium, 2009, etc.) relates a series of heartwarming tales from his time with the storied franchise.

The author, whose previous Yankee-related books have been aimed at children, here offers a biography that seems straight out of a 1930s movie. As a young troublemaker, he was caught spray-painting graffiti on Yankee Stadium by the team’s new owner, George Steinbrenner. Hours later, he found himself in uniform, shagging flies from his heroes as a batboy, a job that would lead to a lifetime working in baseball. Negron’s effort to show the kindhearted side of the notoriously prickly “Boss” permeates this touching book. He joined the Yankee organization shortly after Steinbrenner’s purchase of the team, and he was there through the glory years of the 1970s, when the team included such icons as Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin. The author formed life-altering friendships with each of them, and he also features the triumphs and tragedies of other stars, including Mickey Mantle, Catfish Hunter, Dwight Gooden, Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. Each chapter recounts a “miracle” from the author’s time with the team, and Negron provides ample insight into the real men behind the uniforms. Though he doesn’t hold back from showing their flaws, the lenses through which he views them are heavily rose-colored.

A treasure-trove for sentimental Yankees fans and a feel-good read for all baseball fans.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-87140-461-9

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: July 11, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

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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