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Sto caricando le informazioni... Hardball: A Season in the Projectsdi Daniel Coyle
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Four blocks from Chicago's affluent Gold Coast, the Cabrini-Green housing project looms, a notorious inner city of poverty, violence, and despair. Not an easy place to play ball. But in 1991 two men - one black, one white - started a Little League, twenty teams sponsored by Chicago corporations. Daniel Coyle volunteered to help coach one of the teams, the First Chicago Near North Kikuyus, and the following season, he decided to record their story: fourteen remarkable children and their six coaches, an unlikely group thrown together on a baseball field in the midst of Cabrini's gang-ruled streets.
From the team's first practice to the end of all unexpectedly triumphant season, Hardball chronicles the Kikuyus, on the field and off. Coyle brings us into the lives of children both carefree and exultant at play yet disarmingly sober in the face of their family circumstances, kids startled by the sight of cows and cornfields during a trip to Iowa yet inured to the sound of gunshots at home. With frankness and poignancy, he tells of the team's joys, losses, and small but essential victories, and of the neophyte coaches whose role moves haltingly from teaching baseball to being big brothers, disciplinarians and ultimately friends. Hardball is a powerful story of a team's struggle against the odds, a struggle that in the end speaks to the most important concerns of our time and to the resilience of children everywhere. In the Kikuyus we see not only a deeply troubling image of the way things are, but also a hopeful glimpse of the way they might be. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
 Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni...GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)796.357The arts Recreational and performing arts Athletic and outdoor sports and games Ball sports Ball and stick sports BaseballClassificazione LCVotoMedia: (3.86)
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First of all, it was aggravatingly overwritten. Coyle added plenty of details, I assume in an attempt to paint a full and vivid picture. What resulted were paragraphs of overly flowery, dull and pointless prose that did nothing to further the story. As he tried to add dialouge and mimic the 'street kids' language, he just sounded like every other uptight white guy who's awfully proud of himself for spending time 'in the projects'. I was a little embarrassed for him.
The pages and pages of play by play baseball business were pointless. As I said, I'm a huge baseball fan. But reading chapter after chapter of moment by moment commentary on a strike out is boring - no matter how much you like baseball. Yes, I cared how the kids did and yes I wanted to know who was struggling and how their games turned out, but I didn't need this much detail.
Writing aside, I had some issues with the author's clear bias against Al, the man who actually founded the league. Al was from the projects and was an African-American man. Initially he was portrayed somewhat sympathetically but eventually he was reduced to being some crazy guy who, and I'll quote, "must have been killed a nigger once." Based on the information in this book it seemed clear that Al wanted control of his league and had trouble letting some of that control go to the volunteer coaches. It also seems somewhat understandable to me, that as a man who'd lived in the projects all his life, there would be some resentment of a bunch of rich, white dudes coming in and telling him how to run his league and how he could best impact these children's lives.
Overall I did not like the writing and I did not like the angle the author took. I did learn a few things about Cabrini-Green but you could shave 200 pages off this book and still get as much out of it. (