Nice guys do not always finish last, but they also do not necessarily make the most compelling subjects for biography.
Wilson (The Bird: The Life and Legacy of Mark Fidrych, 2013) delivers a pedestrian treatment of an impressive baseball player and admirable man.
Brooks Robinson is, by all accounts, a wonderful, kind man. During his Hall of Fame baseball career as a third baseman with the Baltimore Orioles from 1955 to 1977, he was universally loved as a teammate and respected as an opponent. Growing up in Arkansas, he was raised in a close family, and he eventually had a close family of his own. Throughout his entire career, he was never the source of controversy; in fact, he seemed almost too good to be true. On the field, the third baseman was one of the greatest fielders in the history of major league baseball, a status already earned but cemented by his performance in the 1970 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, when he put on one of the most scintillating performances in the history of the game. At bat, Robinson accumulated respectable and intermittently impressive numbers (.267 career batting average and more than 2,800 hits), though without his glove, he almost certainly would have been a borderline candidate for enshrinement in Cooperstown. Baseball fans of a certain age will welcome Wilson’s biography of the Baltimore Orioles' star. However, the best sports biographies transcend the games the athletes play in order to reveal something significant about the man or the time in which he lived. Whether through the limitations of the biographer or his subject, this one does not. Since Robinson embodied the ideal of the mid-20th-century All-American athlete, the book often reads like a hagiographic Frank Merriwell tale come to life, including plenty of clichés and aw-shucks language.
Nice guys do not always finish last, but they also do not necessarily make the most compelling subjects for biography.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03304-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
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
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