An admiring tribute to Bart Starr, who led the Green Bay Packers to NFL Championships in the 1960s and to easy victories in the first two Super Bowls.
Journalist Dunnavant (The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize, 2006, etc.) feigns no objectivity, offering a throwback 1940s-era sports biography that seems to have slipped through a time warp. The narrative begins with the observation that the efficient, stolid Starr has been underrated and then moves to his early life in the mid ’30s. Born to a militaristic father, Starr grew up in a home characterized by competition. Starr’s father encouraged his sons to compete with each other, favored Bart’s brother (who died in boyhood of tetanus) and only grudgingly came to deem worthy the athletic accomplishments of his surviving son. Dunnavant credits the elder Starr’s harsh household for Bart’s moral and athletic growth and throughout rails against the permissiveness of the ’60s. Continually, the author inserts Wikipedian updates on American culture in various years and decades, a technique that soon grows wearisome—as does his fondness for single-sentence paragraphs that seem designed to emphasize but instead add only white space to the narrative. Dunnavant dutifully and unremarkably chronicles Starr’s progress as a player through high school, the University of Alabama and the Packers—at each stage no one expected that he would excel—noting his assiduousness, praising his character (his devotion to his wife, his philanthropy) so often that he sounds like a doting press agent. The author tries to sugarcoat Starr’s later problems as a head coach and GM and, fittingly, ends with the words “thunderous ovation.” A fawning fan letter.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-36349-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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