Often candid and even self-deprecating memories by an athlete who once stood at the summit of his profession.
A former major league baseball All-Star and MVP—and current TV analyst for the New York Mets—reviews his boyhood and the dawn of his professional career and reveals some of the secrets of his success.
Although Hernandez claims that he doesn’t want his text to be like other baseball memoirs, in fundamental ways, it is exactly that. The author provides game-by-game accounts, descriptions of influences (good and bad and mixed), and details about influential managers such as Ken Boyer and fellow players, including Pete Rose—though the author does not comment on the Rose exclusion-from-the-Hall-of-Fame controversy. We learn about Hernandez’s Spanish heritage (though his teammates called him “Mex”), his flirtation with drugs, his sometimes-excessive drinking, and his struggles with his father, who trained him but ultimately couldn’t let go. But in his style, Hernandez does distinguish himself, offering a variety of chapters: flashbacks to boyhood (italicized), accounts of his current occupation as a broadcaster, and details about his journey through the minor leagues and into MLB, where, after experiencing some difficulties and frustrations, he soon emerged as a major talent. He alternates the chapters, shifting readers from past to present to past again, and he pauses periodically to elaborate on certain elements of today’s game that annoy him: the obsession with home runs and the consequent shrinking of baseball parks and the soaring influence of statistics (see Moneyball). Hernandez concludes one minitirade with this: “Boring, one-base-at-a-time, home-run baseball. Yuck.” We also learn some things about the author that may surprise readers—e.g., he likes to draw, and he collects first editions and works of art. Refreshingly, he also blames himself for the dissolution of his first marriage, confessing that he cheated on his young wife.
Often candid and even self-deprecating memories by an athlete who once stood at the summit of his profession.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39573-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
