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CLEMENTE

Name: CLEMENTE
Author: David Maraniss
ISBN: 0-7432-1781-0

THE PASSION AND GRACE OF BASEBALL’S LAST HERO

by David Maraniss ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 25, 2006

A nuanced, expertly written life of much more than a sports hero.

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Roberto Clemente wasn’t the best baseball player ever, but he was a great one—and one absolutely necessary for his time and his team.

So claims Washington Post editor Maraniss (They Marched Into Sunlight, 2003) in this agile biography of the immutably proud Clemente, who wore his anger and sense of injustice as a badge of honor, certain that he and his fellow Latino ballplayers were undervalued and exploited. He complained of the sports press, for instance: “They have an open preference for North Americans. Mediocre players receive immense publicity while true stars are not highlighted as they deserve.” He wasn’t thinking selfishly only of himself, but of Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, Julio Roubert and other players who had just crossed a sometimes double color line—not just against blacks, but against just about anyone whose first language was not English. Clemente distinguished himself as a baseball player, going to heroic lengths for the Pittsburgh Pirates (though he really wanted to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers), with whom he spent his entire professional career (1954–72). Clemente’s extraordinary performance in the 1960 World Series is the stuff of legend, with the Pirates beating the Mickey Mantle/Roger Maris–era New York Yankees, and Maraniss delivers an exciting reconstruction. He is clearly at home with the workings of the game, and his account of Clemente’s ability to judge whether a bat was any good from the way it sounded (he was also an amateur woodworker) will please anyone who remembers the pre-aluminum days. Yet Maraniss scores a double play by tracking Clemente’s evolution as a social force: The ballplayer indeed helped break down racial barriers, and was a humanitarian and philanthropist to boot. It seems that Clemente could have played until he was 100, but he died in a plane crash while delivering aid to victims of the 1972 earthquake that shattered Nicaragua.

A nuanced, expertly written life of much more than a sports hero.

Pub Date: April 25, 2006

ISBN: 0-7432-1781-0

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
PATH LIT BY LIGHTNING
by David Maraniss

- BOOK REVIEW
A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY
by David Maraniss

- BOOK REVIEW
ONCE IN A GREAT CITY
by David Maraniss

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.