A bracing memoir from the world champion skier and straight shooter.
With his impressive number of world cup wins, unique skiing style and colorful origins, Miller has made a fine subject for many a sports writer looking for a good story. But they get him all wrong, every time, Miller says. True enough, he was raised in a comfortable relationship with the great outdoors. His parents were hippies who made an informed decision to live off the grid and free their children from the strictures of school. He emphasizes that, contrary to what’s been reported, they were not backwoods hicks. In fact, as the grandson of an Ivy Leaguer who founded the Tamarack Tennis Camp in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Miller comes from sports royalty, and his success on the slopes is hardly shocking. He gives a fast-paced, entertaining account of growing up with a family that seemed to be entirely composed of daredevils and free-thinkers. Moving on to recap his career, he recounts how he started out spending his days on the slopes while his peers were in the classroom, eventually making his way to a boarding school with a killer ski team. He discusses his philosophy—“Have fun”—and his techniques, such as using Power Bars to wedge his legs forward in his ski boots. His equipment, the competitors, the endorsements, the spectacular flame-outs—the author tells all in a style that has made him so fun to watch on the slopes.
For skiers and sports fans, a good look at the thoughts and methods of a winner.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-6235-7
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SPORTS & RECREATION
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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