A rags-to-pinstripes tale of America’s game with placement, velocity, and hubris, likely to go post-season. (Illustrations)
Baseball’s bellicose lefty produces a text packed with a pitcher’s pleasures and pains.
Wells is a kick-ass kind of guy, and so was his biker-babe Mom, Attitude Annie. Raised without Dad, his father figures were Mom’s pals, the local Hell’s Angels. The welfare kid got older and bigger; growing up was another story. If a game doesn’t go according to plan, Boomer may still wreck the dugout furnishings to the tunes of Metallica. Altercations with civilians are not unknown. Yet the guy could always throw smoke. Starting from the Medicine Hat farm club (with an interlude living in the back of a van and bussing tables), he was traded from Toronto to Milwaukee, Detroit, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. But in the bigs, the place he yearned for was Yankee Stadium. Now the home of his hero, Babe Ruth, is home to David Wells, who recalls here the day he wore Ruth’s cap to the mound. In greater detail, he describes his duels with sluggers and swingers, pinch hitters and pull hitters. Major outings are deconstructed inning by inning, pitch by pitch. Casual spectators and rabid fans will learn much about working the hitters and how it is to pitch a perfect game while hung over. Don’t forget the gout, the chips in the elbow, and the chips on the shoulder. Then there’s the money. (This once-poor hurler cries “throw me a bone,” by which he means incentives in the millions.) People like David Cone, Spanky Anderson, Joe Torre, Cal Ripkin Jr., the ineffable Marge Schott, and Boss Steinbrenner make appearances, but personal matters, like family life, get just a nod; this is about baseball. And it’s pure locker-room trash talk, jock-jokey and fun. If last year didn’t earn a championship ring, just wait.
A rags-to-pinstripes tale of America’s game with placement, velocity, and hubris, likely to go post-season. (Illustrations)Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-050824-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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