Better than your average memoir of rise, fall and redemption.
Pitching great Gooden tells the story of his spectacular baseball career and the loss of it all through a devastating cocaine addiction.
By age 21, Gooden had won Rookie of the Year and the Cy Young pitching awards, become the youngest player ever named an All-Star, and pitched on the 1986 Mets World Series winners. Yet, he missed the victory parade for the Series win because of an all-night cocaine binge. So begins this saga, written with the assistance of Newsday columnist Henican (Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior, 2013, etc.), of a brilliant athlete bent on self-destruction. Raised by a loving yet volatile family, Gooden learned to pitch at an early age under the gentle tutelage of his father. But, as a 5-year-old, he witnessed his sister’s husband shoot her five times. Drafted by the Mets at 17, he began a meteoric rise to the big leagues and, eventually, cocaine addiction. For Gooden, cocaine was “love at first sniff.” While he pitched for 16 years, his life was, before and after baseball, constant turmoil: failed drug tests leading to a year’s suspension from baseball, in and out of rehab, multiple arrests ultimately leading to him becoming a fugitive from the police, for which he went to prison. Gooden tells his story straightforwardly and seemingly honestly, and he mixes in entertaining stories of his encounters with baseball luminaries from Pete Rose to George Steinbrenner, who supported and never gave up on Gooden. He talks in detail of his often strained relationship with fellow troubled Met Darryl Strawberry. Gooden finally kicked his habit on the TV show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew. Now two years straight, he seems to have his life in order, and he emerges in these pages as a good guy who did dumb things.
Better than your average memoir of rise, fall and redemption.Pub Date: June 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02702-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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