God and the gridiron define the young life of the winningest quarterback in NCAA Division I football history.
No one knows for sure what kind of NFL QB former Texas Longhorn signal-caller Colt McCoy will turn out to be. The youngster looked promising in limited work with the Cleveland Browns during his rookie season last year, but it wasn’t nearly enough to start drawing comparisons to Browns legend Bernie Kosar. Still, as anyone with even a passing interest in the game knows, just getting to the NFL is a stunning achievement. Handing off the narrative to each other as they march downfield, McCoy and his father Brad offer a glimpse into how a small-town Texan was able to realize his big-league ambitions in this intimate look at how one football-obsessed family has successfully navigated their way to the NFL. Sure, it helped that Brad was a respected high-school football coach, but his 24-year-old Evangelical Christian son would have readers believe that it was the Almighty who really pushed him across the goal line. That fact should be understood at the outset—the fiercely devout McCoys are on a mission and proselytizing. The younger McCoy never misses an opportunity to sling a Bible verse at readers. If that kind of thing turns you off, look elsewhere. But if you’re down with the program, or just want to know more about the new hope of the Cleveland Browns offense, then this conversational account of Colt’s rise to the top should suffice.
Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 9781616266592
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Barbour
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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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