I’m Keith Hernandez: A Memoir

I’m Keith Hernandez: A Memoir by Keith Hernandez

Keith Hernandez is one of the better sports authors out there who once played the game.  He wrote an outstanding diary of the 1985 New York Mets season called “If at First” that I must have read about a half-dozen times.  A lot of jocks and ex-jocks want to tell their stories, but the majority of them simply aren’t gifted enough to write an interesting reflection of their place in their particular sport.

This book is not an autobiography; yet a memoir.  Hernandez does write a lot about himself and the game, but this book is mostly reflections on portions of his career, and not a start-to-finish tale of his life. In fact, this is the one thing that might disappoint many who decide to read the book.  Readers should be warned that, as far as Keith’s playing days go, he basically stops the narrative around 1980 when he was still with the St. Louis Cardinals.  I’m not sure why.  Is he planning on writing a sequel?  Still, though, overall I enjoyed the book.

In this memoir, Hernandez bounces around a lot.  He talks about playing baseball as a young child (with a loving but micro managing father), his first few years in the St. Louis Cardinals organization in professional ball, and his latter (current) career as a broadcaster for the New York Mets.  This is probably a good thing since, had he stuck to only one of these narratives, it probably would have been too much for the average reader to assimilate.  The chapters about his childhood are short and rare (all written in italics as if to say ‘come reminisce with me!’), and the main focus is on Minor-to-Major league Keith along with his current-day reflections on how the game has changed in 40 years; mostly for the bad.

Since Hernandez was a great baseball player, he didn’t spend too much time in the minors. Yet these reflections of this point in his career are quite heartwarming. Hernandez doesn’t hold anything back. This book would definitely get an ‘R’ rating if made into a movie. He makes it very clear that ballplayers are not choirboys, and in the minor leagues, there’s a lot of steam to blow off when you travel around the country in third class accommodations while staying at seedy hotels.  The anecdotes are plentiful and well told. When he describes what happens ON the field, Hernandez digs a tad too deep into the weeds. What’s remarkable is how Hernandez manages to remember all the details of so many games that he played, and he provides his readers with a play-by-play in many instances. It really is too much.

When Keith breaks into the big leagues, the pattern is a bit the same. The stories told about what happens off the field are much more pleasant to read about then the in-game minutia.  I suppose if your Hernandez’s age and you remember all of the ball players he refers to, and what they did in each game, it might be a tad easier to read through these events.   I love the sport of baseball, but critics are sometimes correct when they say the games can drag on a bit.  If you think this is true about WATCHING a game, imagine what it’s like to READ about a game; especially one that happened 40 years ago.

His current day observations, while a tad depressing, are spot-on.  And who is better suited for such observations than a former all-star player who now is a major league broadcaster?  He does share a bit in this book about things a major league announcer is expected to do (you don’t just show up and talk the viewer through games), but a lot of these portions focus on how and why the game has changed. In Hernandez’s view, it needs to change back to the old ways.   (Note: many in the business agree with him and the rules of the game seem to slightly alter each year to achieve some sort of harmony.  This is mainly due to the lackluster attendance at major league games that keep perpetually dwindling.)

As many readers have pointed out, I would have rather read about the 1980s Mets than the 1970s Cardinals, but Hernandez did share a lot about the big bad Mets already in the above mentioned book “If At First”, so maybe he felt like he would have been repeating himself?  There have also been a TON of books written about the 1980s Mets teams, so maybe Hernandez was simply trying for a different angle.

Still, Keith is a great writer, and I would personally love to see a sequel to this book sometime.  Maybe, 10 years from now, Keith will attempt such an undertaking. By then, maybe a lot of the negative issues with the game will have been fixed, and we can read about positive directions the sport is taking as opposed to the ever so slight deterioration of America’s Pastime.

Gwendy's Button Box

Gwendy’s Button Box – by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar

In addition to Stephen King’s remarkable total of about 60 or so full-length novels, he’s also written quite a few compilations of short stories. In those books, some of the stories run as few as 10 pages; some as many as 65 or 70.  Well, what if he took one of those 65 or 70-page stories and released it as a full-length book?  He could easily “double” the page length by adding a lot of unnecessary chapter breaks within the story. He could then add a blank page between each chapter, use very thick paper and add a few illustrations throughout.  He could then publish it as a stand-alone hardback, charge about $25 and, due to his reputation, easily rake in a couple extra million.

This is exactly what Gwendy’s Button Box feels like.  Was it planned this way? Well, probably not.  For starters, this book has a co-author, Richard Chizmar.  I don’t know anything about Chizmar, nor the level of contribution from both the authors, but I’m sure Chizmar was quite pleased when he got ‘the check’.

I confess I didn’t buy this book.  I borrowed it from my local library. I’m glad I did. I wasn’t kidding about the $25 price tag.  I’m not a person who can shell out so much for so little.  You can easily read this book in one sitting (I did it in two).  No matter how a great a reputation Stephen King has, there’s simply too much out there of high value with a significantly lower cost.

That’s not to say this is a bad story. It’s quite good, in fact.  Gwendy Peterson is a 12-year old girl who hasn’t grown out of her chubby adolescence yet. She decides to do something about it by doing a daily run of the “Suicide Stairs” in a park area in her hometown of Castle Rock, Maine.  One day she meets a mysterious stranger who gives her a mysterious gift – a box with mysterious buttons.  She’s given vague instructions by the stranger who then inexplicably vanishes.

Without going into much detail, this ‘box’ is both powerfully good and powerfully bad. We grow up with Gwendy until high school and live through the highs and lows of her young life.  This is basically a nice, short tale that I couldn’t help thinking could have easily been added to one of Kings many compendiums. Yes, Castle Rock is a familiar place for many of King’s stories (Anyone remember Sheriff George Bannerman?), but overall, I can’t help but conclude that this was a pleasant read, yet not really worth all that money.

Maybe much of the work here is co-author Richard Chizmar, and if so, God bless him.  I’m sure he can sell quite a few more books on his own after this one had been published due to the curiosity of King’s bazillion fans.  Those familiar with the business know how tough it is to make at is a well-read, respected author, and by King giving his brethren exposure anyway he can, I’m perfectly fine with that.

Unless you’re one of those ‘collectors’ though, I would recommend renting or borrowing as opposed to buying.  Maybe there will be a cheap paperback one day.

London

London – by Edward Rutherford

It’s impossible to even look at the cover of this book, without ever reading it, and not think of the author  James Michener. Michener was the master of titling many of his epic novels with a geographic location, and then tell the story of that location with a wide array of characters that would usually span thousands of years. The purpose of this type of novel is to tell a great story, but to also make the characters somewhat secondary so the author can focus on the many events that shaped the particular location where the stories take place.

And, yes, this book does just that.  It begins many years before Christ and ends around 1940 when Hitler unsuccessfully tried to bomb the city of London into submission.  Throughout the two thousand years or so, we focus on the same few ‘families’, so each time we arrive in a new century with a new story, we’re meeting the ancestors of characters we’ve already met.   However, I was left with the impression that Edward Rutherford doesn’t quite do as good of a job as James Michener normally did; at least not in this book.

First, Rutherford covers way too much ground and it feels like, as a reader, I scarcely had time to catch my breath. Every time I would start to settle into another ‘time’, I would quickly be jarred 5, 10, 20 years in the future, and I had to unscramble my brain to keep up with the progression of all of the characters, their new surroundings, their new children, their different predicaments, and so on and so on.  To the author’s credit, he tries to keep his reader grounded by pointing out the obvious similarities between the family members over the generations.  The main family in this book, for example, are always distinguished because it seems like they all have a ‘white patch of hair’ in the center of their forehead, along with webbed fingers.  This is the authors way of telling you that you’re reading about a descendant of some of the characters you’ve already read about earlier in the book. It helps somewhat, but I kid you not, it seemed like this book contained about two or three dozen characters over its 2000 years that have this physical peculiarity.   I simply couldn’t keep up.

I also wish that he would have focused a tad bit more on the last couple hundred years.  Whenever I think of ‘historic’ London, I think of the 1800s when people like Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence Nightingale and Alexander Graham Bell roamed the streets.  Sadly, this doesn’t really happen. If I’m not mistaken, by the time we get to page 800 or so (out of an 1100-page book), we’re still stuck in the 17^th or 18^th century.  This book was a tad too weighted on ‘The Middle Ages’ for my tastes. I was hoping for more latter-day stuff; at least when the horse and buggy was predominant.

Then, the author also seems to feel obligated to inundate his reader with ALL of the history of London.  Each time we read a new section, we have to read about the architecture, the politics, the key political figures, the royalty, the achievements, the origins of the nomenclature and on and on. It was oh so easy to just lose interest and tune out.   I must admit, it’s kind of cool to read about the (tragic) history of ‘Ring around the Rosie’ and the origins of things like ‘Greenwich Time’, but again, it simply seemed like too much.

The good news is that when Edward Rutherford is actually telling a story, he tells a really good story. This leads me to conclude that had he not tried to put SO much here, I might have enjoyed the book a bit better. I confess there were times near the end when I simply wanted to finish the thing, and I didn’t really care too much about what happened in many of the latter chapters.  In fact, I must admit there were a few chapters near the end that I just skimmed through much of the minutia hoping to come across some story. Sometimes I was successful, other times not so much. 

More good news is that the sentiment of many of the Amazon reviewers seems to be in agreement with me, and most state that, of all of Rutherford’s works, this one isn’t as good as many of his others. Since this was my first book by this author, this means I’ll definitely pick up one of his other books and try him again. As I said, he does know how to tell a good story when he’s not trying to give his readers a detailed, mundane history lesson.   

I would conclude by saying that I felt that this book could have been twice as good if it were only about half as long.