Cromartie, a decent baseball player who became a superstar across the Pacific, and Whiting, a crack baseball writer (You Gotta Have Wa, etc.), combine on a gutsy look at baseball, Japanese style. The ex-Montreal Expo was floored when he landed at Tokyo's Narita Airport in 1984 to the effusive greeting of his new boss: ``You are our messiah.'' It didn't work out that way at first. Cromartie slumped-until a batting lesson from manager Sadharu Oh set him straight. Soon he was burning up the league during the first of seven splendid seasons culminating in a Japanese MVP. Cromartie sketches in his American background-poor childhood, racial tension (he is black), nine seasons in the Show-but the juice here flows f rom the clash between American and Japanese baseball sensibilities. We've heard it all before-the rigid conformity, the exhaustive workouts, the nitpicking by coaches, the obsession with ``spirit,'' the fanatical press coverage, the xenophobia-in Whiting's brilliant earlier accounts of besoburu, but the weirdness, to American eyes, of Japanese baseball takes on new life when filtered through Cromartie's electric narrative. The man is candid (he fills us in on the difficulties of urinating in Japanese locker rooms, the charms of Japanese groupies), angry (mostly about the racism of the Japanese, who snub their greatest player, Sadaharu Oh, for being half-Chinese), generous (in his praise of Oh, for instance), always exciting. Banzai!
Pub Date: April 8, 1991
ISBN: 4-7700-1423-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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