A heartfelt, sincere, mini–self-portrait by a man who epitomizes class.
One of the greatest golfers of all time offers up some stories and advice.
Palmer (A Golfer’s Life, 2000, etc.) is one of the best and best-loved of all golfers. The “King” (he admits he doesn’t like this moniker) feels this slight book is particularly important to him. Now 86, he realizes there are things “I still wanted to say to my friends in golf and to fans of the game in general.” The book is very conversational, as if he were right there talking to you. Packed with stories and a few tips, it’s divided into three sections: Golf, Life, and Business. The chapters are short, some only a couple pages. Palmer begins with his “tough, taciturn disciplinarian” father, a greenskeeper (and later the pro) at the Latrobe Country Club in Pennsylvania. He showed a 3-year-old boy how to grip a club, stand, swing, and, most importantly, show good sportsmanship. Palmer adhered to most of this advice, especially the last one. He has always been gracious in defeat, and the fans—Arnie’s Army, a phrase born in 1959—love him for it. He chides young pros who chicken scratch their signatures for fans; take your time and do it right, he says. He admits to being a “strong-minded person and maybe a bit stodgy.” One of his “most favorite personal golf memories” was the day he shot 60 at Latrobe. He’s made 20 aces and owns 2,000 putters and 10,000 clubs. The golfer he holds in the “highest esteem of all” is Byron Nelson, but the player he always wanted to beat—“to a pulp”—was Jack Nicklaus. Palmer’s advisers were against him starting the Golf Channel. He said: “Let’s do this.” And that famous tea and lemonade drink? He “concocted it one afternoon with the help of my wife.”
A heartfelt, sincere, mini–self-portrait by a man who epitomizes class.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08594-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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