Despite the tawdry ending, Montville clearly had fun creating a playful buzz of words to raise the ghost of The Splendid...
Snazzy biography of The Kid that manages to be subtly characterful and thorough at the same time.
This portrait of baseball legend Theodore Samuel Williams (1918–2002) is sweeping and sweet, the images coming at the reader like jump-cuts to catch a moment or a tone. As he deserves, Williams gets double-barreled treatment. He was, Montville (At the Altar of Speed: The Fast Life and Tragic Death of Dale Earnhardt, 2001, etc.) makes plain, a self-centered, willful motor-mouth with a penchant for rococo, profane poetry whose temper and un-sportsmanlike antics kept him at loggerheads with Red Sox fans. He also could swing a bat like no other and gave his spark to the comfort and pleasure of kids. The author’s Beantown background (he was formerly sports columnist at the Globe) gives him access to all manner of Boston characters, from mayors, university presidents, and Harvard’s athletic director to broadcasters, coaches, batboys, and Williams’s brother’s son, for starters. Their reminiscences almost always lift Williams out of one morass or another he has gotten himself into with his penchant to shoot from the hip. Most beguiling is Montville’s delineation of Williams’s incandescent relationship with the Boston press corps, particularly the likes of Dave Egan, Austen Lake, and Huck Finnegan, reminding us that words, in the paper and on the radio, were how people related to sports in the age before TV. The text also covers three marriages, lasting unmarried love with Louise Kaufman, and his children. Williams’s military service in WWII and Korea seems simple in comparison. It all ends with a bump and a thud and a lot of ice when Williams’s son John-Henry has his father’s remains frozen, the coup de grâce in a long string of opportunistic acts.
Despite the tawdry ending, Montville clearly had fun creating a playful buzz of words to raise the ghost of The Splendid Splinter.Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50748-8
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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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