Like all fine sports biographies, this one is not merely about an athlete. It is the story of an extraordinary and quite human man who happened to play baseball. Falkner's (The Short Season, 1986, etc.) literate, balanced account strives to get to the facts behind the Jackie Robinson legend, even when it hurts. An outstanding high school athlete, Robinson had repeated scrapes with the law during his teen years in California and was a member of a youth gang. A football star at UCLA, he quit just prior to graduation in 1941 to play semi-pro baseball, basketball, and football. A cloud hangs over his military career, when he was often involved in racial incidents, especially his court martial at Ft. Hood, Tex., for a Rosa Parkslike incident on a bus (he was acquitted). When Branch Rickey signed him to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947, both men knew they had a fight on their hands. The press, the public, and many in baseball vilified them, and Robinson had to endure continuous torment. But the deal was contingent on his vow to remain silent and not fight back. Falkner adequately recounts Robinson's storied career, but he focuses more on the man off the field and how he coped with pressure and fame. Unexpectedly interesting is Falkner's examination of Robinson's life after retiring from baseball in 1956. Named by Roy Wilkins to chair the NAACP's Freedom Fund, Robinson soon found himself to be a rarity: a politically conservative black celebrity. He stunned everyone by supporting Richard Nixon in his 1960 presidential campaign and, later, by going to work for New York's Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. His public confrontations with Malcolm X and Adam Clayton Powell came, ironically, at about the time he was inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame in honor of his historic, groundbreaking career. Intricately detailed and perceptively digressive, Falkner's work is as good as the best books by Donald Honig or Roger Kahn. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-79336-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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 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.
