A broadcaster's captivating but unsentimental memoir of the relationship he enjoyed for more than 12 years with the late Walter Lanier (``Red'') Barber. Edwards had hosted NPR's Morning Edition since its late 1979 inception when the nonpareil sportscaster was persuaded to make a weekly appearance on the program. Almost every Friday from 1981 until Barber's death last October at age 84, the author (at the mike in a Washington, D.C., studio) and ``the ole redhead'' (speaking via satellite from his retirement home in Tallahassee) chatted at 7:35 a.m. EST. The four-minute spots soon became one of the NPR network's most popular features, thanks mainly to the discursive charm of the sometime voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees. Barber offered knowledgeable commentary on a wealth of subjects, including camellias, cats, the English language (which he employed with elegant precision), literature, race relations, religion, and, of course, the wide world of sport. Owing to hard labor as a play-by-play announcer for high-school basketball tournaments in his salad days, however, the Mississippi native didn't have much use for the court game. Nor was Barber an unfailingly lovable fellow: He could turn flinty and sternly demanding when an associate didn't meet his high standards of accuracy or integrity. As Edwards nonetheless makes clear through generous samples of their unscripted dialogues, short takes on Barber's career, anecdotal material gleaned from colleagues, and Red's influence on the author's own life, the stylish southerner was a genuinely good man off the air as well as on. An affectionate and affecting tribute to a friend who seldom was at a loss for words. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-87013-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1993
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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