A thorough yet static portrait of one of the most accomplished players of baseball's ``golden age.'' ``I have never been a yes man,'' declared Rogers Hornsby in a 1950 interview, and this statement sums up his character. Alexander (History/Ohio Univ.; Our Game: An American Baseball History, 1991) depicts his subject as a man of strange contrasts: a teetotaler but also an inveterate gambler; a devoted son but by most accounts an absentee (and occasionally indifferent) father. Born in 1896, Hornsby was raised by his widowed mother and spent his youth working the stockyards in and around Fort Worth, playing industrial-league ball whenever time permitted. Initially undersized and unspectacular, he eventually grew into a player worthy of reckoning, generally acknowledged as the sport's greatest right-handed hitter. In 1915, at the height of a talent war initiated by the upstart Federal League, Hornsby joined the National League's St. Louis Cardinals and quickly became the senior circuit's best-known, best-paid star. But he had a prickly nature and wore out his welcome with the Cards (and their brilliant martinet of a general manager, Branch Rickey) after he led the team to their first World Series championship in 1926. Gradually, after playing relatively short stints for a succession of teams including the Giants, Braves, and Cubs, Hornsby became something of a baseball vagabond; itinerant employment, failed marriages, and mounting gambling debts frequently brought him to the brink of insolvency. However, owing to his professional reputationhe was named by baseball writers to the ``all-time all-stars'' in 1957he remained involved in some capacity with the game until his death in 1963. Alexander conveys an impressive wealth of facts, though his narrative seldom jumps off the page; nor does he satisfactorily explain how the game changed during Hornsby's career. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-2002-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
