A loving appreciation of a rare commodity: an extraordinary athlete who was an even better man.
A neglected baseball great receives his due in this comprehensive biography.
In their second collaboration, veteran authors Clavin and Peary (Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero, 2010, etc.) highlight another player egregiously overlooked by baseball’s Hall of Fame. At the conclusion of his playing career, Gil Hodges (1924–1972) had put up numbers that ranked among the all-time best. The authors dutifully chart his on-field heroics, reminding us of his slugging prowess (career home-run record for National League right-handed batters), his Gold Glove fielding and his knack for the big moment. More than anything, though, they feature Hodges the man, a fellow whose decency and character made an impression on everyone around him. From his sports-obsessed Indiana boyhood, to his short college tenure, his World War II service with the Marines, his crucial role as a leader of the storied 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, his managerial stint with the Washington Senators and, most famously, with the Miracle Mets of 1969, Hodges was the sort of man after whom friends named their sons. For his quiet manner, stoicism and professionalism, he regularly drew comparisons to the sainted Lou Gehrig. A modest, devoted family man, Hodges was beloved in Brooklyn. When he slumped horribly in the 1952 World Series, church congregations prayed for him; when he brought a championship to the historically hapless Mets, all of New York toasted him. Perhaps he kept too much inside. As an adult, he was a chronic worrier, and he never discussed his combat experiences. Only a longtime smoking habit hinted at the stress he must have felt before his second heart attack in 1972, which killed him. The authors’ brief on behalf of Hodges’ Cooperstown credentials won’t persuade everyone, but baseball fans will appreciate this look at an often-overshadowed star.
A loving appreciation of a rare commodity: an extraordinary athlete who was an even better man.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-23586-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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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