A good book for the reactionary on your gift list.
Acclaimed sportswriter and best-selling novelist Jenkins (The Franchise Babe, 2008) writes about golf, his upbringing and how "everything was better in the '30s."
The author credits his sheltered and untroubled upbringing (he brags that his childhood was untouched by the Great Depression or World War II) for his choice of career path: writing sports stories and "all those darn novels with happy endings." He strikes resonant chords with sports fans when he states, "A sports event is the true showbiz—it's real" and, "Every kid should have two big sports events in his life." A 1935 college football game and the 1941 U.S. Open golf championship created indelible memories and strengthened his bond with his largely absent father. However, Jenkins assumes readers will be familiar with many other severely dated references—e.g., actress Joan Fontaine (her film debut was in 1935), The Guns of Navarone (released in 1961) and Toots Shor's restaurant in Manhattan (shuttered in 1971). Throughout the book, the author is scornful of contemporary culture, expounding on "the folly of political correctness" and calling those who have objected to his opinions as among the "long lines of people in our midst who live in Victimhood." When he tells how college students stare uncomprehendingly when he shares his influences and books he enjoys rereading, he actually says, "Kids today." It's also surprising that a veteran sportswriter believes that Tiger Woods—the most prodigious, heralded and important professional golfer of the late 20th century, who brought multiracial and -cultural inclusion to professional golf, the exclusive province of WASPs for more than a century—doesn't measure up to Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer or Jack Nicklaus. Such a narrow-minded view from a celebrated contributor to Golf Digest makes one wonder for what he is also nostalgic.
A good book for the reactionary on your gift list.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-53225-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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