Will be devoured by Yankees loyalists and happily sampled by all baseball fans.
Baseball’s greatest relief pitcher reflects on his just-concluded surefire Hall of Fame career.
When a modern-day ballplayer insists he doesn’t play for money, that personal statistics don’t matter, or that he’s never cheated, heads will shake and eyes will likely roll. It’s a measure of the esteem in which he’s held that Rivera tends to be believed. Over his 19-year career with the Yankees, Rivera became the all-time saves leader and won five World Series. Along the way, he conducted himself with such humility that he earned the love of his teammates, the deep respect of opponents and the admiration of fans. This memoir demonstrates why. With the help of Coffey (co-author, with R.A. Dickey: Wherever I Wind Up, 2012, etc.), Rivera recounts his childhood in Panama, his progress as “a bottom-of-the-barrel” prospect to and through the major leagues, and his inviolable game-day routine. He touches on his many, thrilling career highlights, but he spends as much time on those occasions where, as the most reliable closer in the game, he failed. It’s no surprise to read his admiring, affectionate assessments of teammates—Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Paul O’Neill, Bernie Williams and especially Derek Jeter—and of his respect for opponents like Edgar Martinez and Dustin Pedroia, but Rivera makes a place for less-glittering names as well: his mentor Chico Heron, his saintly wife, Clara, Yankee trainer Gene Monahan and minor league teammate Tim Cooper. Rivera mildly criticizes his high school math teacher, an anonymous Westchester County homeowner, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano but otherwise saves any harsh remarks for himself, “an imperfect man on an imperfect journey.” The author’s preternatural calm clearly stems from a deep religious faith some nonbelievers will find disquieting, explaining his devastating cut fastball as a gift from God, his belief in miracles and his conviction that the Holy Spirit once spoke to him on the mound.
Will be devoured by Yankees loyalists and happily sampled by all baseball fans.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-40073-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
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