An entertaining and important look at an often unexamined page in sports history.
Variety film critic McCarthy (Howard Hawks, 1997) highlights women’s roles in the annals of automobile racing.
Formula 1 fans and NASCAR aficionados, as well as those for whom Danica Patrick opened up the world of auto racing, might be shocked to learn that a number of women figured prominently in the sport from its late-19th-century infancy. The heyday for women racers in the U.S., notes the author, came during the 1950s, that notoriously celebrated decade of domesticity. Particularly the years 1953 through 1958 marked what McCarthy calls “a privileged moment in the grand sweep of American automobile racing, a small window of time when the sport was accessible to virtually anyone with a desire to pursue it; if you had a car and were good enough, you could drive it to a track and race. Women included.” While McCarthy spotlights the gossip column–like lives and impressive achievements of Evelyn Mull, Denise McCluggage, Ruth Levy and Mary Davis—all gifted racers of the period—he also frames their triumphs within the broader context of other groundbreaking or just sensational events for women and the car in general. One such moment occurred in June 1909, when Alice Ramsey, a 22-year-old mother from Hackensack, departed New York City in her $1,500 windowless, gas gauge–less, four-cylinder, 30-horsepower Maxwell DA and became the first woman to drive across the continent, arriving in San Francisco almost two months later. Another took place in 1934, when Elfreida Mais decided to attempt a different sort of record by driving her car through a burning wall packed with dynamite; needless to say, this automotive first proved to be her last act. Though somewhat disjointed, McCarthy’s vividly episodic account runs the gamut from behind-the-scenes partying to the fascinating variety of records women attempted, representing not only the obvious tests of speed and distance, but also those of physical endurance.
An entertaining and important look at an often unexamined page in sports history.Pub Date: May 16, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4013-5202-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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
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