One of the more skilled biographies baseball fans could hope to find.
Sports journalist Appel (Pinstripe Empire: The New York Yankees from Before the Babe to After the Boss, 2012, etc.) delves deeply into the baseball career and personal life of Casey Stengel (1890-1975), a solid player and legendary manager.
Citing new material unavailable to previous Stengel biographers and chroniclers of the New York Yankees, the author offers an informative, smoothly written account of a complex and relentlessly interesting subject. In 2009, the Major League Baseball Network sponsored a campaign to identify the most memorable “character” in the sport’s long history. Stengel placed first, ahead of Yogi Berra, Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige, and numerous other legends. Presumably, Stengel won because of his occasional antics on the field and in the dugout as well as for the way he spoke, an idiom dubbed in the 1930s as “Stengelese”—the New York Times described it as a “unique way of turning short answers into run-on sentences.” However, Appel demonstrates convincingly that Stengel was no clown. He could speak clearly and grammatically when he chose to do so, he was an insightful student and teacher of baseball, he understood how to connect with others, he was a sophisticated investor who accumulated wealth, and he was a loving husband to his wife for decades. Despite an unusual physique, he demonstrated outstanding athleticism as a youth and rose quickly through the ranks of professional baseball as a hitter and outfielder. After retiring from active playing, his baseball intelligence led him to managing in the minor and major leagues. Though his records with those early teams are unimpressive, when the New York Yankees hired Stengel to manage the 1949 season, the legend for winning began, lasting through 1960. After those remarkable baseball seasons, Stengel reluctantly retired, only to return in 1962 to lead the newly created New York Mets franchise. Stengel is unquestionably one of baseball’s most significant characters, and Appel is the perfect fit to chronicle his life.
One of the more skilled biographies baseball fans could hope to find.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54047-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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