A must-read for fans, but fails to capture the true essence of Bettis’s charisma.
Self-serving career retrospective from one of the NFL’s all-time leading rushers and all-around nice guys.
Bettis’s life is a checklist of quintessential sports fairy-tale elements: dangerous childhood in a poor Detroit neighborhood; drug deals and bad influences; hardworking, supportive parents who instilled values; scholarship to prestigious university (Notre Dame); illustrious and potentially hall-of-fame career in the NFL; storybook ending after winning the Super Bowl in his last game—in his hometown of Detroit, no less. It’s beyond question that “the Bus,” an immensely popular player as a result of his talent, charm and tireless philanthropy, has a tale to tell. Too often, however, what could have been an enlightening, inspiring look inside professional football by an intelligent man who overcame overwhelming obstacles becomes a rote recitation of game statistics accented by a discordant measure of braggadocio. Bettis chronicles nearly every good game he ever played and offers justifications for some of the bad ones, ranging from the numerous painful injuries he suffered throughout his career to a lack of talented teammates. ESPN writer Wojciechowski (Cubs Nation: 162 Games, 162 Stories, 1 Addiction, 2005, etc.) valiantly tries to inject some life into each chapter via descriptive introductions and interviews with friends, and the duo does manage to provide some genuinely touching moments, particularly when highlighting the unswerving loyalty the Bus inspired in teammates like Hines Ward and Ben Roethlisberger. The book works best when Bettis discusses his relationships with his family and other players or riffs on random topics ranging from his love of bowling to his condemnation of Notre Dame for its relatively quick firing of black head coach Tyrone Willingham. When it loses itself in the congratulatory minutiae of its subject’s accomplishments, however, readers are likely to start heading for the exits.
A must-read for fans, but fails to capture the true essence of Bettis’s charisma.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52061-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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