Aptly titled, this autobiography of the Philadelphia 76ers' ``Round Mound of Rebound,'' written with Sports Illustrated's Johnson, is calculated for full shock value—and delivers. It also provides an entertaining, unabashedly honest look at the NBA's most controversial star. Following three stormy years at Auburn Univ., where he was ``the second best athlete'' on campus (after Bo Jackson), Barkley was the Sixers' 1984 first-round draft pick. Four inches over six feet, a ``cannonball amid men,'' the five-time All-Star, despite his weight problems, is the rebound king: ``any nitwit can score.'' Meanwhile, his career has been marked by one controversy after another, the most notorious being the March 1991 spitting incident in which he aimed at a heckling fan—``the guy's lucky to be alive''—and hit an eight-year-old girl. The league fined him $10,000. In all, Barkley has paid over $100,000 in fines. ``My mouth,'' he writes, ``has probably cost me at least $1 million'' in endorsements. Certainly his comments here do little to curry favor. He blasts the NBA for not doing more about obnoxious fans; warns owner Harold Katz that if his ``moves don't work, maybe I'll do something drastic'' in the middle of the 1991-92 season; continues his criticism of teammates Manute Bol (``a one-dimensional player'') and Armon Gilliam (``Mr. Macho''), and claims that the ``NCAA is committing grand larceny by not paying college athletes.'' Sure to rankle fans, players, officials, and the media, Barkley frankly admits that ``the main reason'' he'll be on the 1992 Olympic team ``is because it's a free trip to Spain....Give somebody else the gold medal; I just want the gold.'' Barkley will win few friends here, but his blatant honesty is perversely refreshing and likely of wide appeal. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-73799-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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