A welcome life of the Yankees icon and worthwhile reading for any baseball buff.
A vigorous biography of the New York Yankees legend.
Lorenzo Pietro Berra (1925-2015), first nicknamed “Lawdie,” wasn’t supposed to be a baseball star. His father, an Italian immigrant to St. Louis, discouraged his ambitions, saying that it wasn’t seemly for a man to make a living playing a boy’s game. Branch Rickey shook his head at the young man’s prospects. He was goofy looking and odd, speaking a “mangled English [that was] the product of his Italian-language household and his uneasy relationship with school.” Yet, as Pessah, a founding editor of ESPN the Magazine, writes, Lawdie shook them off. Soon given the new nickname of “Yogi” for his habit of sitting cross-legged while waiting to bat or take the field, he started racking up admirable statistics—and a solid sense of how the business of baseball worked, which served him well. He was especially well served by a mistrust of management early on, for Yogi would fare ill at the hands of executives like George Steinbrenner in his later career as a coach and manager. The narrative often takes a play-by-play flavor (“Bodie doesn’t disappoint. He brings in Yankee Phil Rizzuto to play shortstop and Red Sox star Dom DiMaggio—Joe D’s younger brother—to man center field”) that suits the story just fine. Yogi emerges as a man who was more thoughtful than many give him credit for, even if he may have often played the rube—when told he was at an impasse in negotiating a contract, he replied, “What the hell is an impasse?” Of course, as any baseball fan knows, he was no slouch on the field, known far and wide for hammering pitches into the parking lot and giving teammate Mickey Mantle a run for his money as a slugger.
A welcome life of the Yankees icon and worthwhile reading for any baseball buff.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-31099-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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