Hawk: An Inspiring Story of Success at the Game of Life and Baseball

Rating:
Summary: A Man Called Hawk
Review: Looking at a list of autobiographies of Hall of Fame-quality baseball players, one would think that Andre Dawson's would be one of the better ones. He flourished for 20 years with forgettable teams, finishing with 438 home runs and 314 steals, a terrific combination of power and speed. He was also one of the highest-profile victims of the 1987 owner collusion that rocked the sport, and the first player from a last-place team to be named Most Valuable Player of his league.

However, "Hawk" is completely run-of-the-mill. At less than 200 pages in length, and written at a junior-high-school reading level, it's a book I read in one weekend. Entire years of Dawson's career fly by in a single paragraph -- and even then it was written two years before he retired. What few individual games he describes, are poorly-remembered: there are some annoying statistical errors that could have been resolved by Dawson's co-author merely looking at boxscores.

Dawson's biography is really about his Christian faith, and about the support of his family through lean times. The book came out through a Christian publishing division, so that's no surprise. The final chapter ends with a sermon about living positively and an invocation to the Lord.

In terms of being a good baseball book, there's an intriguing early look at current star Alex Rodriguez (Dawson writes in 1994). There's a good concise history of the ownership-players labor strife, and two memorable stories: one about Dawson's signing wih the Cubs in 1987, and another about a shocking act of racial prejudice in Montreal. But in the long run, the stories of faith are inferior to Dave Dravecky's in "Comeback", and the labor history falls short of even "Ball Four".

"Hawk" is aimed primarily at Christian teens, and works best when read on that level. When Dawson is elected to the Hall of Fame in 2003, however, his autobiography will not go with him.

Rating:
Summary: A Man Called Hawk
Review: Looking at a list of autobiographies of Hall of Fame-quality baseball players, one would think that Andre Dawson's would be one of the better ones. He flourished for 20 years with forgettable teams, finishing with 438 home runs and 314 steals, a terrific combination of power and speed. He was also one of the highest-profile victims of the 1987 owner collusion that rocked the sport, and the first player from a last-place team to be named Most Valuable Player of his league.

However, "Hawk" is completely run-of-the-mill. At less than 200 pages in length, and written at a junior-high-school reading level, it's a book I read in one weekend. Entire years of Dawson's career fly by in a single paragraph -- and even then it was written two years before he retired. What few individual games he describes, are poorly-remembered: there are some annoying statistical errors that could have been resolved by Dawson's co-author merely looking at boxscores.

Dawson's biography is really about his Christian faith, and about the support of his family through lean times. The book came out through a Christian publishing division, so that's no surprise. The final chapter ends with a sermon about living positively and an invocation to the Lord.

In terms of being a good baseball book, there's an intriguing early look at current star Alex Rodriguez (Dawson writes in 1994). There's a good concise history of the ownership-players labor strife, and two memorable stories: one about Dawson's signing wih the Cubs in 1987, and another about a shocking act of racial prejudice in Montreal. But in the long run, the stories of faith are inferior to Dave Dravecky's in "Comeback", and the labor history falls short of even "Ball Four".

"Hawk" is aimed primarily at Christian teens, and works best when read on that level. When Dawson is elected to the Hall of Fame in 2003, however, his autobiography will not go with him.