In this briskly paced book, readers will recognize the courage and tenacity of everyday competitors and the power and...
Austin American-Statesman energy and environment reporter Price seeks to overcome his "genetic foibles" in pursuit of a singular and profound experience: dunking an NBA basketball.
Before he began his yearlong exploration of whether dunking was "literally and metaphorically” unattainable for those with his specific genetics or increasing age (34), he was humbled when tests performed by doctors at a fitness lab diagnosed him as being in “completely average” condition. Through his efforts to increase his body's upward kinetic force to enable him to dunk, Price examines the larger issue of whether humans can outwit their physical limits and asks if it is actually possible to "dream up a task” and force your body to follow. On his journey, the author consulted a variety of experts, including geneticists and other scientists (including a Cambridge professor who specializes in the nervous system of locusts), as well as brick-chopping karate black belts and children at basketball camps. By not dragging readers through the weeds of mathematical formulas—an appendix includes tips for “how to jump higher” and a microlesson in the physics of dunking—Price comes across as a nonintimidating science teacher with a dry, sometimes self-deprecating wit. In easy-to-understand language, he explains such concepts as neuromuscular composition and the biomechanics of propulsion in humans and animals. During the course of his pursuit, Price faced down numerous psychological and physical obstacles, as well as dramatic setbacks off the hardwood, but his optimism, perseverance, and development are at the heart of this good-natured chronicle of his efforts. “I was like a lot of people: athletic enough, with a thin desire to win, but never the best and never desperate to be the best,” he writes.
In this briskly paced book, readers will recognize the courage and tenacity of everyday competitors and the power and awe-inspiring achievements of elite athletes.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3803-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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