A diffuse and hype-riddled profile of world soccer's ``bad boy.'' Burns, a correspondent for Britain's Financial Times, pieces together the career of Diego Maradona, which saw remarkable heights and depths—often in quick succession. To Burns, Maradona (who as of this book's UK release in 1996 was serving a ``banned substances'' suspension by soccer's international governing board) was a mercurial soccer ``genius''—a phrase the author badly overplays—who all too often fell prey to his protean appetites for drink, drugs, and the company of easy women. Growing up in Argentina's machismo-soaked sporting culture, Diego was further encouraged to succeed by his family as a way out of poverty. Maradona's later troubles, it would seem, stemmed from his having too much too soon: He played his first professional match in 1976, just shy of his 16th birthday; by the time he was 22, he was a millionaire. When he was good, he was very good: In 1986 he led Argentina to a World Cup title, and during the late '80s he paced the moribund Napoli franchise to two Italian league championships. However, as talented as he was down on the pitch, he could never outrun the demons that tormented him, including addictions to alcohol and cocaine—the latter habit he likely picked up in the early '80s while he was with his first international club, Barcelona FC. Complicating Diego's life was the steady company of hangers-on who fed his ego and nurtured his love for fast times, too often while reaching into his pocket. While Maradona's is an interesting story, even for soccer-ignorant Americans, Burns's narrative lacks, well, soccer- -specifically, any description of what made Maradona so much greater than other players. Without this to complete the picture, the accounts of his repeated failings lack either context or interest. (24 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-55821-597-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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