Simon and Garfunkel famously asked, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Clavin reminds readers that Joe is not the only...
A fine biography of the greatest brother combination ever to play major league baseball.
Vincent, Joe and Dominic DiMaggio lived out the American dream. Three brothers of 11 children born to Italian immigrants, the three boys excelled first in the Pacific Coast League for the local San Francisco Seals and then, one-by-one, they rose to play in the major leagues. Vince, the eldest of the three, broke his father’s prohibition against wasting time with games and thus paved the way for his brothers. Joe, the middle of the three, was the legend who married movie stars but was also cold and distant. Dominic, the bespectacled youngest and smallest of the trio, was a star in his own right but lived in the shadow of Joe. The journeyman Vince had the most trouble adjusting to post-baseball life and struggled just to make ends meet. Joe continued to be reticent and reserved, never recovering from his star-crossed marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and effectively made a career out of being Joe DiMaggio, legend. Dominick meanwhile, had the most grounded and, in many ways, successful post-baseball career, using his intellect to become a successful businessman. A fourth West Coast native, Ted Williams, plays almost as much of a role in the book as the brothers DiMaggio. He and teammate Dominic continued to be close for the remainder of their lives, with Williams always maintaining that Dominic belonged in the Hall of Fame. Clavin clearly agrees, and it is a strength of this evocative book that while Joe remains the legend, Dominic comes across as the most admirable DiMaggio in the end.
Simon and Garfunkel famously asked, “Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Clavin reminds readers that Joe is not the only DiMaggio worth remembering.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218377-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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