An amiable portrait of a baseball great—like Yogi Berra, Dizzy Dean and Satchel Paige—whose outsized personality looms even...
A veteran author teams with the daughter of Vernon “Lefty” Gomez (1908–1989) for a biography of the Yankee legend.
One of the game’s singular personalities and greatest big-game pitchers, Lefty Gomez entered the Hall of Fame in 1972. In a career cut short by injuries, he nevertheless managed to win 20 games four times, lead the league three times in strikeouts and shutouts and twice in ERA. A fierce competitor, he started and won six of seven World Series games (while losing none), and three of four All-Star games. Daughter Gomez and Goldstone (Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865–1903, 2011, etc.) dutifully cover the baseball heroics, from Lefty’s California boyhood, the town teams and semi-pro ball, his signing with the San Francisco Seals and his storied Yankee career. The narrative’s chief delight, though, is the treatment of Lefty the character. For his pranks, eccentricities and high-spirited antics, he acquired the nickname “El Goofo,” but the moniker belied a steady character that led teammates to confide in him, a keen native intelligence and ready wit. Sure, he once famously held up a World Series game as he contemplated a passing airplane, but this same man perfectly captured the fearsome slugger Jimmie Foxx by remarking, “He has muscles in his hair.” Thanks partly to his marriage to showgirl June O’Dea and his post-playing career as sales rep and goodwill ambassador for Wilson Sporting Goods, Lefty traveled widely and appears to have hung with an endless list of famous friends: sitting in with bandleader Eddy Duchin, chumming with James Michener, dining with Hemingway, fishing with Ted Williams, playing cards with the Babe. Though this largely adoring treatment acknowledges some dark passages—a near-divorce, a midlife bout with alcoholism, the motorcycle death of a beloved son—the overwhelming impression is of a crowded, accomplished life exuberantly lived.
An amiable portrait of a baseball great—like Yogi Berra, Dizzy Dean and Satchel Paige—whose outsized personality looms even larger than his considerable athletic achievements.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-345-52648-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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