Rather than a journalist’s or a biographer’s disinterested analysis, the author offers a fan’s notes.
A deeply admiring, fawning biography of the great St. Louis Cardinal.
Longtime New York Times sports columnist Vecsey (Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, 2006, etc.) wears glasses with deeply Cardinal-colored lenses throughout his anecdotal record of the Hall of Fame left fielder/first baseman, whose spectacular career—which included a .331 lifetime average and a record 24 All-Star selections—ran from 1941 to 1963. Readers who want details about Musial’s personal life will have to wait for a more rigorous treatment, as will fans who want thorough descriptions of specific games and seasons. But those who want repetitious pages about the wonders of the character of Stan the Man will find their appetites quickly sated. Vecsey narrates chronologically, but there are numerous brief interchapters highlighting moments in Musial’s life, generally designed to establish his sainthood qualifications—his acts of kindness and comments from adoring fans and former teammates. Rarely does the author say anything negative (Musial once refused to sign an autograph), but, otherwise, it’s trivia and treacle. Vecsey even ends with a personal memory of Musial’s warm hand after a recent handshake. The author celebrates Musial’s great 1962 season (he hit .330) but neglects to mention his subsequent year (.255)—or to note that in his final five seasons he hit over .300 only once. Repeatedly, Vecsey laments Musial’s inferior position to Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in most fans’ minds, attributing it to Musial’s self-effacing goodness. In perhaps the most egregious example of his tendentiousness, the author notes that Musial went to his St. Louis restaurant the night of the JFK assassination because he realized “his buddy had been gunned down, and the world needed to see Stanley.”
Rather than a journalist’s or a biographer’s disinterested analysis, the author offers a fan’s notes.Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-51706-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: ESPN Books/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
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