Becker uncovers it all and doesn't pull any punches, even when he's the one getting the beating.
Wimbledon champ Becker discusses his many triumphs and misadventures.
Becker, the blond Teutonic giant with the killer serve, Wimbledon’s youngest champion, was always known on the court for his intensity; that same focus is present on the page as Becker discusses his career and home life over the past two decades. The episodes that Becker explores include his divorce, his tax evasion trial and his illegitimate daughter. It seems that, despite the glory, the endorsements and the money, it wasn't easy being Becker, particularly with the hopes and dreams of his entire country riding on the outcome of every game he played. Along with the grueling personal incidents, Becker discusses his professional tennis days in detail: his coaches and their strategies, his battles on the court, his physical injuries. But while tennis fans should enjoy reading about the type of racket he used, where he stayed near Wimbledon and what he ate before big games, at the heart of this are Becker’s relationships, including those with competitors McEnroe and Lendl, with his ex-wife and children and with the one-night stand who became the mother of his only daughter. A non-linear timeline first places the champ on the court at the moment of his win, then at his father's funeral, then at the airport, where he is detained after a tax evasion conviction, and so on. In all, the work is intelligent and earnest, revealing a complexity that few may have suspected.
Becker uncovers it all and doesn't pull any punches, even when he's the one getting the beating.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-553-81716-7
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Bantam UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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