How baseball turns boys into men, and vice versa, considered with feeling and a bittersweet edge.
Baseball maven Stanton’s sentimental The Final Season (2000) earned him an invitation to speak during induction week at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Here, he recounts that event—and a lot more.
It was in 1972 that 11-year-old Tom first began badgering his father to take him and older brother Joey to Cooperstown, New York, because “our team,” the Detroit Tigers, was in a dogfight for the American League pennant. The recurrence of their mother’s brain tumor and subsequent surgery, however, put the trip off indefinitely. After that, Stanton recalls, “We were always going to go there sometime, but the sometimes ran out.” Some 29 years later, however, Tom gets the call and invites Dad—now in his 80s but still capable of reciting entire genealogies of Tiger players—to drive out from Michigan along with Joey. The journey begins and ends with random but vivid flashbacks triggered by each Stanton in turn, as Cooperstown becomes an allegory for anticipation. Baseball is the theme, of course, but the author uses affinity for the game as a matrix for probing the male bond, belatedly comprehending the vast depth of parental love, examining the roots of pride and accomplishment, and even expiating (then resurrecting) sibling rivalry. As they tour Cooperstown’s museum, nostalgia and myth bubble up, interweave, and are sometimes amended: Babe Ruth, it turns out, was not an orphan; Abner Doubleday was away at West Point around the time the game was perfected; Ty Cobb actually wore sheepskin sliding pads! Homeward bound, the Stantons’ constant gentle banter on who best remembers what really happened eventually subsides into tacit realization that this, their first-ever overnight trip together, is also their last.
How baseball turns boys into men, and vice versa, considered with feeling and a bittersweet edge.Pub Date: June 9, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30350-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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