Balanced and intelligent, this is the first biography of the legendary University of Alabama football coach since his death early in 1983, written by a contributor to the Birmingham Post-Herald who interviewed Bryant for his high school paper. Bryant really was a larger-than-life figure, almost literally. At 6' 3' and 210 pounds, he wasn't much smaller than John Wayne, to whom many of players compared him. His physical size would help extricate him from a life of poverty and hard labor, making him an asset to his high school football team and leading him to an athletic scholarship at the University of Alabama. Bryant played with an intensity that overrode his occasional awkwardness. He was the kind of athlete who, despite a broken leg, would suit up and play against hated rival Tennessee. As a coach, he would encourage the same kind of dedication in his players. Bryant was the last of a kind: the coach as absolute monarch, ruler of all he surveyed from his famous tower overlooking the 'Bama practice field. Dunnavant retells all the familiar stories from Bryant's career as the winningest major-college head coach: his resignation from Maryland after the university's president ordered the return of a player he had disciplined; his fabled first season at Texas A&M, in which he ran off all but 29 prospective players with a diet of two hard practices a day in the desert heat; his battles with the press in two libel suits; his extraordinary string of successes at his alma mater. Dunnavant labors mightily to keep the book balanced. He talks about Bryant's excessive drinking, his recognition in later years that the super-tough discipline of his early days might not be applicable in the Vietnam War era, the occasional coaching mistake that cost a team a victory. But Dunnavant can't find feet of clay in this hero, nor does he look especially hard. It's just as well, because they probably aren't there.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80041-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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