Looking back late in his baseball career, a one-time dominant phenom tells of his life at both the center and fringes of the game. As a young fireballer for the New York Mets in the mid-1980s, Dwight “Doc” Gooden was on top of the baseball world. He had success—by his early 20s, he had won Rookie of the Year honors, a Cy Young Award, and a World Series ring—and, as a superstar in the Big Apple, he had the most exciting lifestyle imaginable. Surrounded by his brash Mets teammates and Manhattan nightlife, Dwight the shy teenager quickly matured into Doc the confident party animal. Eventually, Gooden’s attention wandered from the game to the pursuit of good times, and his golden arm began to betray him just as the Mets’ presumed dynasty began to falter. (A talent-rich juggernaut in 1986, they were expected to rule baseball for years.) Serious fun off the field soon began to eclipse Dwight’s achievements on it. He was twice suspended for drug use, in 1987 and again in 1994. With the help of friends, family, and solid professional advice, Dwight reclaimed some of his glory in May 1996, when he pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees, who later that year went on to win the World Series. Gooden movingly describes the giddy joys of being young, rich, and seemingly invulnerable. He provides powerful insight into the mind of a pitcher, illuminating several elements of baseball that normally escape all but the most knowledgeable fans. When discussing his professional reversals, particularly his plunge into the gutter, he is brutally candid; he also seems to genuinely understand how his failings affected those closest to him. Assisted by Klapisch, one of the best sports scribes in the game, Gooden vividly re-creates for readers a roller- coaster ride of disparate emotions, from triumph to loss and shame. An honest, sincere, and affecting memoir.
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16339-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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