For skiers and sports fans, a good look at the thoughts and methods of a winner.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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