A neat slice of local color, regional history and the joy of amateur sport.
Valley reflects on the zeal, pride and love his amateur team from Rye, N.H., brought to hockey through the 1940s and ’50s.
The author uses a considerable measure of polish, not unlike the surface of a pond after a long freeze, in this memoir of his hockey-playing years, principally for the Seahawk team from his native New England. From Thanksgiving until the ice rotted in April, his town was obsessed with hockey. World War II veterans started a club (perhaps, Valley suggests, not just to play but to help bevel some of the harsher experiences of war, in a game where warlike tendencies are kept in check) that rose to prominence through the B ranks. The author turns a bright light on the thrill of the game, its mesmerizing flow of speed, skill and color, but finds something deep within the Seahawks. The team members organized everything independently–the outdoor rink, uniforms and money needed to sustain a club–when times were still economically hard. They “gave everyone a source of community entertainment and, more importantly, something to identify with, get behind and make everybody proud.” Valley also captures some quality on-ice action, as he joined the Seahawks between the goal’s pipes when he was 14 years old. It’s good, cringing fun to read of the poor goalie’s circumstances–the equipment was primitive, and he wore no mask. Still, the author shrugs off one encounter that left a number of his teeth on the ice and 80 stitches in and around his mouth. He provides choice nuggets of club history–for their first game, since no local sport shop stocked the hockey variety, “each player was wearing an extra-large, bright pink ladies garter belt under his hockey pants.” No one will begrudge him if he goes on a bit about his coming retirement from the game and struggles to determine when his exit is graceful rather than premature.
A neat slice of local color, regional history and the joy of amateur sport.Pub Date: Dec. 25, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-931807-72-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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