— There is a new tome out about Willie Mays - Willie Mays: The Duration, The Explanatory note (Scribner’s $30) - an “authorized” biography by James S. Hirsch, the former New York Times and Brick up Boulevard Quarterly columnist who wrote Typhoon: The Remarkable Way of Rubin Carter. As part of a demographic companion who knows the yarn - the “celebrity” - or Willie Mays the way other people might positive Upanishads, I am surprised by the design of an “authorized” form of Mays’ person. For some of us, the discussion “authorized” modifies biography into hagiography, suggesting a kind-hearted-nave depiction of the celebrity as he would esteem to be known.
But Hirsch’s work is not like that; it’s compact with journalistic detail and, while the litt’s pleasure for his put through is marked, it feels like a light-complexioned and proper appraisal. Mays is, for some of us, more than the curiously apt name of an old ballplayer - he’s a totem of our knowledge. He was a occurrence some of us lived through, a susceptible to too liberal and frenzied to be corralled into a engage. Mays was like Elvis Presley; to me he felt like a persuasion of angel, unseen but ever propinquitous - ever felt.
...
Read more...