Reviews for Outdoor Sports And Games (Large Print)

The average rating for Outdoor Sports And Games (Large Print) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-07-23 00:00:00 Stephanie Ouzts Writing a good junior biography is tricky. A nuanced impression of the subject's life needs to be given, but there usually isn't as much space allotted as for an adult biography. In the case of Joe DiMaggio, part of Lerner Publication Company's Sports Legends and Heroes series, Kevin Viola had less than a hundred pages to sketch the life of Joseph Paul DiMaggio so that not only would modern baseball fans be able to see why he's one of the best to ever swing a bat, but he would be revealed as a real human being with setbacks and sadnesses on his way to success. That's a tall order for a master biographer to fill in five hundred pages or more, but Kevin Viola, a virtual unknown, does it in a far more restricted page count. I've always loved Joe DiMaggio, the personification of grace, athleticism, and championship pedigree on the baseball field, and this book enhances my admiration without painting an unrealistically rosy picture of him. It's an excellent biography. The DiMaggios immigrated to the United States from Italy shortly after Joe's father, Giuseppe, went to the California coast on his own to see if he could make a living. Commercial fishing in San Francisco turned out to be big business, so Giuseppe's wife Rosalie joined him in the New World and they started a family. Giuseppe eventually earned a robust income but had many children, so the DiMaggios never had enough money to be comfortable, and Giuseppe insisted each of his sons join him on the fishing boat when they came of age. This caused friction between Giuseppe and his son Vince, a talented athlete with no desire to be a fisherman. Semipro baseball teams in and around San Francisco offered Vince a salary to play for them, and young Joe secretly wanted to follow the same path. Never proficient in school and averse to the physical demands of commercial fishing, Joe dreamed of being a ballplayer, but Giuseppe opposed his sons playing a game as their job. Luckily for Joe, Vince made good as a player for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League and earned major dollars, convincing Giuseppe to reconsider his opinion of professional baseball. A natural hitter, Joe played his way onto the San Francisco Seals roster and joined his older brother on tour. The odds of a lucrative baseball career were slim, but Joe had a good headstart. A meteoric prospect in the PCL, Joe proved he could hit off the league's best pitchers, garnering attention from Major League Baseball scouts. He was a smart, smooth player who always seemed to make the right decision on the ballfield. The vaunted New York Yankees offered the Seals a pile of cash and a few good players for Joe, and their desire to acquire him wasn't quelled even when the budding star suffered a knee injury that curtailed his production. Would Joe bounce back from the malady, or were his brightest days behind him? The Yankees took a gamble and were rewarded with a rookie who arrived in the majors already refined, prepared to help his team contend for a championship. In 1936, Joe's debut season, he shouldered a good part of the load to win the American League pennant and a World Series title for the Yankees. What more could he accomplish on a baseball diamond? "I don't think anyone can ever put into words the great things DiMaggio did. Of all the stars I've known, DiMaggio needed the least coaching." —Yankees manager Joe McCarthy, quoted on P. 50 of Joe DiMaggio Joe's sophomore campaign started as propitiously as '36. He swatted hits against pitchers of the highest quality, racking up a .346 batting average, forty-six home runs, and one hundred sixty-seven runs batted in, legacy numbers even for a team with the Yankees' proud history. His Bronx Bombers crushed the New York Giants in the World Series, and Joe's performance put him in position for a pay raise. His demand for $40,000 in the 1938 season devolved into a cold war with team ownership that nearly ended Joe's tenure with the Yankees, but he gave in and signed the $25,000 contract that owner Jacob Ruppert offered. Joe disliked being at odds with the fans, who booed him at season's start. But Joe didn't let his early slump persist; he began developing the perfectionist tendencies that elevated him throughout his career whenever sportswriters predicted his demise, and he ended 1938 with typically elite stats. The Yankees steamrolled the Chicago Cubs in the World Series. "[Joe] had the greatest instinct of any ballplayer I ever saw. He made the rest of them look like plumbers." —Major League umpire Art Passarella, quoted on P. 68 of Joe DiMaggio 1939 was a banner year for Joe. All season he flirted with a .400 batting average and probably would have attained it had he not come down with an infection in his left eye. Against Joe's protests, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy insisted on keeping him in the daily lineup despite the infection, and Joe's average fell precipitously. McCarthy likely robbed Joe of a .400 season, which perhaps would have been his greatest individual achievement. Outraged as Joe felt, he was stellar in the World Series, spearheading a sweep of the Cincinnati Reds. Wedding bells made national news when Joe married Dorothy Arnold that November in San Francisco. Joe wanted the ceremony restricted to close friends and family, but the media turned it into a spectacle for the millions of fans who loved Joe. Everyone wanted to feel like part of his big day. In 1940 Joe again logged phenomenal numbers, but the Yankees didn't fare as well, finishing third in the AL. 1941 seemed headed the same way until Joe began his legendary hitting streak on May 15. Following a poor first few months of the season, Joe started collecting hits at a frantic pace, ultimately recording at least one in fifty-six consecutive games, which smashed the previous record (set in the 1800s) by twelve games. Was this Joe at the apex of his powers? Arguably so. His Yankees returned to form by downing the Brooklyn Dodgers in five games at the World Series, but Joe had another salary argument with ownership in the offseason. With World War II in full swing, fans had no patience for baseball contract feuds, and Joe settled for far less money than he wanted. Bothered by the whole messy affair, Joe's 1942 stat line waned, and at season's end he caved to public pressure and his wife's urging, enlisting in the army. He would lose the next three prime years of his baseball career in the military. Joltin' Joe's discipline made him a decent soldier, but he hated leaving his wife, his son—Joe Jr.— and the game of baseball. Joe was wasting away on army bases from Hawaii to Guam, doing nothing but waiting while his best years passed him by. Dorothy divorced him in 1944. Before Joe was ever sent into combat he developed stomach ulcers that led to his discharge from the military. It was too late to join the Yankees for the end of the 1945 season, but Joe resolved to get in shape and reassert himself as team leader in 1946. He also aimed to persuade Dorothy to give their marriage another chance, but these grand plans quickly fell apart. Manager Joe McCarthy, who had become a good friend of Joe's, left the team, and Dorothy became engaged to another man. Joe posted lackluster numbers in '46; impressive for your average human ballplayer, but not Dead Pan Joe. In 1947 Joe took command of the team under manager Bucky Harris, pressuring the young players to adhere to Joe's standard of perfectionism. The hardline stance worked; Joe played like a superstar and New York won the AL pennant by a dozen games. The World Series went a suspenseful seven games against the Dodgers, but Joe's crew emerged victorious. Thirty-three years old in 1948, Joe's body was breaking down. Pain from a heel spur worsened, requiring multiple surgeries. Joe wasn't the same consistent clutch hitter he'd been in his twenties. The '48 season was a disappointment in spite of decent production from Joe, and in 1949, heel pain kept him off the team until late June. Even after joining the lineup, he contributed less to the team's success than previous years, but the Yankees easily won the World Series, the seventh of Joe's career. 1950 saw the continued decline of Joe's role as prospects like Yogi Berra, Hank Bauer, and Whitey Ford ascended, but he remained a solid part of their team that captured another championship. At the start of 1951, well aware of a teen phenom named Mickey Mantle who was destined to succeed Joe as center fielder of the Yankees, Joe announced the season would be his finale. He was vital to the team's dramatic pennant run, his clutch hitting reliable as ever that October as the Yankees dispatched the New York Giants. With a ninth World Series win, the career of one of the finest to ever wear Yankee pinstripes was over. "DiMaggio was the greatest all-around player I ever saw....It might sound corny, but he had a profound and lasting impact on the country." —Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams, quoted on P. 92 of Joe DiMaggio We get to know Joe DiMaggio better on a human level in the post-retirement chapters. Awkward and shy, Joe found that broadcasting was a bad fit for him. He fell in love with rising movie star Marilyn Monroe and they wed, but the relationship was ill-fated. Joe didn't like the attention that swirled around their personal lives, and they split up. When she and Joe reconciled in the 1960s and were on the verge of remarriage, Ms. Monroe was found dead of a suspected drug overdose. Joe mourned his beloved all the remaining days of his life, sending flowers to her burial place twice a week. Joe disliked having his name used for commercial purposes and refused most requests, but had a change of heart when a hospital asked to name their pediatric unit after him. It would bring attention to the plight of the hospital's children, along with much-needed funding, and what boy wouldn't be excited to stay in a facility named for the Yankee Clipper? Entering his golden years, Joe DiMaggio had lived a full life. There were triumphs: nine World Series victories, multiple MVP awards, lasting icon status for one of the biggest franchises in sports. There were also regrets and griefs: two divorces, Marilyn Monroe's untimely death, and a criminal stealing eight of Joe's World Series rings. Those hard-won emblems of his baseball success were gone forever, but at least he'd been wearing the 1936 ring. As Joe neared the end, he looked forward to a reunion with Marilyn Monroe beyond the final horizon. Millions of fans in this life, however, would miss him very much. Kevin Viola's Joe DiMaggio biography is far better than I expected. The primary source listed in the bibliography is Richard Ben Cramer's Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life, which I've heard takes a negative view of DiMaggio, but that doesn't come through in Kevin Viola's writing. He offers a balanced look at a baseball legend, the bad and good, Joe's harsh self-reproof as well as his surprising generosity at times. For such a short book the content is deep, even emotional at the end. Old Yankee Stadium is gone now, but to have visited before its demolition and seen the very outfield grass where a youthful Joe D chased down line drives off the bats of Hall of Famers must have felt unreal, like looking at ground that Paul Bunyan purportedly tread on. This book is a superb biography for young readers; Joe DiMaggio is a baseball hero of mine, and these pages gave me insight into his personal character and athletic splendor. I heartily recommend it.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-21 00:00:00 Glen Adair I'm not a sports fan. I don't watch the games, I don't know the players, or anything else, really. But I really liked this book. What caught my eye was his name. I had heard a lot about him from The Old Man and the Sea, and I was intrigued. From then on, I was impressed by his hard work, amazing talent, and interesting career. I had no clue what some of the terms meant, but nothing held me back from liking this book. If you like baseball, even a little bit, this book is worth the read...especially if you love the Yankees.