Lazarus’ solid, unflashy reporting is celebratory without being worshipful, and his study of what made a winning Washington...
Hail to the…well, Washington, back in the days when its football team’s management made better decisions and its players turned in better results.
Before their decadeslong doldrums and an ongoing controversy over their unseemly name, the Washington Redskins delivered an “unprecedented championship run,” as freelance sportswriter Lazarus (Best of Rivals: Joe Montana, Steve Young, and the Inside Story behind the NFL's Greatest Quarterback Controversy, 2012, etc.) puts it. That run, lasting from 1981 to 1992, was the result of several perfect-storm forces that included a notable roster of players, exemplified by the 1991 team, which lost only 2 of 19 games, and then not by much, with a 16.94-point average scoring differential that no other championship team has matched. Another contributing factor was the presence of legendary coach Joe Gibbs, who accorded his players respect while demanding their best. “The 1991 Washington Redskins,” Lazarus exults, “were Joe Gibbs’s masterpiece: a team with a stellar passing game, a brutal running attack, the best offensive line in history, and a defense that sacked, stripped, or suffocated the opponent every week.” One of Gibbs’ contributions was to break the unsubtle color line that kept African-American players from the captain’s position. As Lazarus observes, up to 1977, only one African-American player had started a postseason game anywhere in the NFL. Another was to de-emphasize the money aspect of the game, and though of course money figures prominently in professional sports, Gibbs spent it uncommonly wisely, not throwing lavish sums at big-name free agents but instead building a roster from the ground up. “I’m a very average person who loves what I do and works hard at it,” Gibbs said with characteristic modesty in a line that might serve as a rebuke to the players, managers, coaches, and owners who have followed.
Lazarus’ solid, unflashy reporting is celebratory without being worshipful, and his study of what made a winning Washington team click will inspire both nostalgia and yearning among fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237573-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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