A simple gem for baseball fans.
A baseball icon’s rediscovered memoir, enhanced with biographical material by the independent scholar who found it.
While researching another topic, Gaff stumbled upon a series of newspaper columns by Major League Baseball legend Lou Gehrig (1903-1941). Those columns, published by the Oakland Tribune in 1927, constitute 90 pages of this book, with Gaff’s brief biography of Gehrig and other related material comprising the rest. Gehrig was only 24 when the columns appeared. They chronicle his youthful years in New York City, unlikely metamorphosis from an awkward wannabe athlete into a Yankees icon, and wide-eyed insights into becoming teammates with, among others, Babe Ruth, who “was the first one to give me advice about keeping in condition.” Divided into nine chapters, the newspaper serial portrays a seemingly uncomplicated young man whose gratefulness for meteoric success contains no hint of jadedness. He lauds baseball at all skill levels as a tonic for American youngsters. Although Gehrig decided not to complete a college degree because the Yankees offered him a contract that he couldn’t turn down, Gehrig advocates for “college men” to consider professional baseball as a career: “I believe [they] can contribute much to the good of the game—and it’s a certain cinch that baseball can contribute much to the welfare and the benefit of the college man.” Gaff’s biographical essay contains strong research and clear prose; his account of Gehrig’s rapid development as a talented slugger is especially inspiring. In 1939, as his athletic skills visibly diminished, Gehrig was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a relentless neurological disorder that is often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. In addition to the biographical information, Gaff also includes some material that will be a treat for Gehrig devotees, including “Lou Gehrig’s Tips on How To Watch a Ball Game” as well as Gehrig’s lifetime statistics and a roster of “the careers of the many players in Lou’s narrative who are now largely unknown.”
A simple gem for baseball fans.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3239-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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