An unassuming yet refreshingly commanding memoir.
New York Mets pitcher Dickey delivers a winsome, well-scripted autobiography.
From humble beginnings in Nashville to a current multimillion-dollar salary with the Mets, the author writes enthusiastically about a life full of twists and turns. Ably assisted by New York Daily News reporter Coffey (The Boys of Winter: The Untold Story of a Coach, a Dream, and the 1980 U.S. Olympic Hockey Team, 2005, etc.), Dickey colorfully describes being raised in the 1980s with little money by two distant parents—though his father instilled in him a love of baseball. Buoyed by baseball, Star Wars and Bible study in his teens, Dickey overcame traumatic childhood sexual abuse by a babysitter and his middle school’s corporal punishment for back talk. A sports obsession soon took priority over everything, including concerns about his mother’s alcoholism. After a stellar career at the University of Tennessee, he began an ascent up the sporting ranks as a high draft pick for the Texas Rangers in 1996, even though his $810,000 signing bonus was drastically reduced once a team-ordered physician discovered his elbow was missing a ligament. His conversation with famed knuckle-ball master Tim Wakefield and the evolution of his trademarked game-changing knuckle ball are just a few of the book’s many highlights. Through the various life and career uncertainties, he and longtime wife Anne leaned on their Christian faith for support, something that Dickey references often without becoming preachy or heavy-handed.
An unassuming yet refreshingly commanding memoir.Pub Date: March 29, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15815-5
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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
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