A candid, clever account, though readers who have never collected baseball cards may find it difficult to comprehend their...
Children’s nonfiction author Wilker (Everything You Need to Know About the Dangers of Sports Gambling, 2000, etc.) relates his life story through the lens of baseball-card collecting and his worship of his older brother.
Because the author’s mother wanted to live a simple, rural life, she left her husband to live with a free-spirited man in Vermont. Finding it difficult to make friends, Wilker created a fantasy life built around the baseball cards that he bought in bubble-gum packs. His more athletic, outgoing older brother sometimes participated in the baseball-card fantasy, but other times showed no interest. As Wilker’s hobby grew, he began to relate less to the star players than to the fringe players—Kurt Bevacqua, Herb Washington, David Clyde, etc.—who bounced between the major and minor leagues or stayed in the majors through persistence and luck more than skill. A fan of the Boston Red Sox, Wilker became emotionally attached to one All-Star, Carl Yastrzemski, but never dared to hope that Yaz would ever notice. Even into adulthood, the author drifted and sometimes depended on illegal narcotics to get through the days. He looked to his brother, his mother, her boyfriend and, eventually, to his biological father for affirmation, but found it only sporadically. Nearing 40, Wilker finally began to pull his life together. His transformation was partly due to the long-time frustrated Red Sox finally capturing a championship, but mainly because he met the soul mate who became his wife, settled in Chicago, made a kind of peace with each of his biological parents and rebonded with his brother.
A candid, clever account, though readers who have never collected baseball cards may find it difficult to comprehend their psychological hold on the author.Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-934734-16-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Frances Coady/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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