Baseball buffs will enjoy this well-researched, smoothly written biography of a complex man, but readers lacking interest in...
Prolific author Dickson (Contraband Cocktails: How America Drank When It Wasn’t Supposed to Be, 2015, etc.) digs deep into the controversial baseball career and spicy extracurricular life of Leo Durocher (1905-1991).
Durocher was a light-hitting, skilled infielder for the New York Yankees and other teams before achieving national renown as the unorthodox, flamboyant manager of a succession of Major League Baseball teams. Away from the baseball field, he hung out with Hollywood celebrities and alleged organized crime figures. Actress Laraine Day became Durocher's third wife, and their marriage made society headlines during rocky periods and even during calmer intervals. Dickson, who has authored numerous books about baseball, labors mightily to sort through the divergent opinions of Durocher: he was either selfish or generous, a talented manger or inappropriate leader of athletes, and worthy or unworthy of his rocky path to his posthumous election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The author pronounces Durocher's memoir, Nice Guys Finish Last, as broadly fraudulent, and he claims that previous biographies are sometimes questionable in both factual accuracy and evaluation of Durocher’s character. Although Dickson mostly eschews psychological analysis, the details of his subject’s life suggest at minimum a manic-depressive disorder, coupled with occasional psychotic behavior. Durocher's poisonous relationships with sports journalists seem especially inexplicable. As for his on-field and clubhouse managing skills, his public castigating of players, particularly Ernie Banks of the Chicago Cubs, qualifies as cringeworthy. Despite the Banks episode, however, Durocher acted honorably regarding racial segregation in professional baseball. After all, he wanted his teams to win, which meant recruiting the most talented players regardless of skin color. His nurturing of Willie Mays is perhaps the most inspiring of all the anecdotes presented here.
Baseball buffs will enjoy this well-researched, smoothly written biography of a complex man, but readers lacking interest in the MLB may be inclined to dismiss the mercurial Durocher as an unpleasant individual not worth trying to understand.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-311-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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