An account of the charmed life of New York Yankee icon Derek Jeter that’s as short on salacious revelations as it is long on adulation.
If Jeter’s life hasn’t been perfect, it’s come pretty close. Notwithstanding some troubling childhood encounters with racism, the handsome, charismatic, biracial Jeter managed to combine the hardworking mindset of his grandfather with the loving positivity of his parents to turn himself into the best baseball prospect—not to mention the biggest Yankees fan—ever to emerge from Kalamazoo, Mich. After being drafted by those same Yankees, the highly touted prospect shot through the minor league ranks and went on to win rookie of the year in Major Leagues, an honor that would presage bigger things to come. ESPNNewYork.com writer O’Connor (Arnie and Jack: Palmer, Nicklaus, and Golf’s Greatest Rivalry, 2009) ably chronicles that rise and those bigger things, including five World Series titles to date, as well as the astonishing list of A-list starlets Jeter dated along the way (while miraculously minimizing his tabloid presence), and his strange relationship with superstar rival/teammate Alex Rodriguez. Though Jeter’s cooperation was limited to a few locker-room interviews, it quickly becomes apparent how much the author reveres his subject, a man whose on-field talent is apparently matched by his off-field integrity, impish sense of humor and ability to charm children. The only real dirt O’Connor can dig up is Jeter’s inability to forgive those who slight him, no matter how innocuously, and even that revelation reads like a well-qualified job candidate’s rehearsed response to the standard interview question about one’s greatest weakness. Still, there’s something refreshing about an icon who actually lives up to his billing as a nice guy, hard worker and great teammate, even if it seems odd to tell his story while it’s still unfolding. Not unlike the Captain’s public persona—polished and well put together, but a bit bland.
Pub Date: May 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-32793-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 4, 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 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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