First-rate cultural history from a writer who touches almost all bases.
In this revisionist version of the Dodgers’ exodus from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, viewed by many as a journey from Eden to Sodom, the Prime Mover emerges as less like Satan and more like Moses—visionary, flawed and ultimately justified.
D’Antonio, who has written on aspects of cultural history from chocolate bars (Hershey, 2006) to spirituality (Heaven on Earth, 1992), enjoyed unlimited access to the huge archive of Walter O’Malley’s papers and has extracted numerous goodies. None, however, is more revealing that what must now be considered unquestionable fact. O’Malley (1903–79) labored assiduously to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, but was stymied at every juncture by Robert Moses, New York’s de facto czar of construction. D’Antonio interviewed myriad surviving participants in the story, players included, to uncover other uncomfortable facts. Even during the Dodgers’ late-’40s/early-’50s glory years, attendance at Ebbets Field was declining for many reasons: lack of parking, white flight to the suburbs, the rise of television. Meanwhile, large cities across the country craved major-league baseball franchises. Los Angeles and San Francisco were respectively courting the Dodgers and Giants, though Milwaukee scooped them both by acquiring the Braves from Boston. When O’Malley saw L.A.’s offer, and realized that there was slim hope for help in Brooklyn, he decamped and transferred the franchise to the West Coast. There, as the author notes, it has flourished spectacularly in one of baseball’s greatest stadiums. D’Antonio spices his forays into baseball business with plenty of baseball folklore. There are several pages on Bobby Thompson’s mythic home run, many on the advent and reign of Jackie Robinson. He sometimes has difficulty with balance, offering only a few swift sentences on Roy Campanella’s career-ending accident, for example. Readers may also wish for more about O’Malley’s private life. We see the franchise owner as a consummate politician, a true mover-and-shaker, but we get few glimpses of his Dodger-blue soul.
First-rate cultural history from a writer who touches almost all bases.Pub Date: March 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59448-856-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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