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
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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