Unfocused but unique.
One of the NBA’s unlikeliest players recounts his long, strange path to the pros.
Allred isn’t the first fundamentalist Mormon to play on professional basketball’s biggest stage, but he was the first legally deaf player in the league, and he might have the most inimitable back story. The grandson of revered “prophet” Rulon Allred, founder of a polygamist commune in Pinesdale, Mont., the author grew up in a household with only one mother while his friends had several. After tensions within the community forced his family to flee, they settled with relatives in Utah, where Allred dealt with the double stigma of coming from a polygamist community and being almost entirely deaf. Basketball, however, proved an ideal outlet for the 6’11” teen; it didn’t require perfect hearing and productively channeled his rapidly growing obsessive-compulsive disorder. His hard work was rewarded with a scholarship to play for the University of Utah, his favorite college team. That experience ended abruptly during his sophomore year, when verbally abusive coach Rick Majerus allegedly made disparaging remarks about Allred’s handicap. After transferring to Weber State and battling his OCD, Allred completed his collegiate eligibility and became a basketball vagabond, accepting offers to play with professional teams in Turkey, France and Spain. Injuries, shady contracts and inconsistent playing dogged him at every stop, and he nearly threw in the towel before signing a $12,000 contract with the Idaho Stampede of the NBA’s developmental league. All ended well when Allred impressed scouts and earned a contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers, becoming a rookie in the NBA at age 27. His narrative suffers from an identity crisis: Is it a polygamy exposé, inspirational story of triumph over adversity, Paul Shirley–esque tale of a basketball outsider, personal journal or basketball chronicle? All of the above, it turns out, and that makes it a welcome departure from cookie-cutter sports autobiographies.
Unfocused but unique.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-171858-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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