An absorbing exploration of one of America’s most popular, and dangerous, sports that will be most appealing to NASCAR fans.
NASCAR legend Waltrip (DW: A Lifetime Going Around in Circles, 2004) takes us onto the track, into the pits and behind the scenes of his racing career.
The author—a three-time winner of the NASCAR Series Cup and winner of the 1989 Daytona 500, a race he describes as NASCAR’s “Super Bowl”—was in the broadcast booth for the 2001 edition, cheering on his younger brother Michael, the eventual victor. That victory was overshadowed, however, by the death of driver Dale Earnhardt in a final-lap crash, and Waltrip’s chilling description of the race and its aftermath are the entry point into an exploration of the author’s life behind the wheel. The majority of the book covers ground familiar to readers of his previously published autobiography, including youthful car chases with the police, triumphs and failures on the track and his discovery of religious faith. Waltrip pays particular attention to his relationships with other drivers including Earnhardt, Bobby Allison and Cale Yarborough, and how their battles on the track often spilled into their personal lives. The author also provides some fascinating background history on racing at Daytona, again emphasizing the dangers faced by the drivers, and the many injuries and fatalities that have taken place there and elsewhere on the racing circuit. In the end, Waltrip argues that only the death of the sport’s greatest star, Earnhardt, led to changes in NASCAR’s attitude to safety, and even then it took strong pressure from him and others to force the adoption of stronger measures by a culture that prizes the recklessness of its heroes.
An absorbing exploration of one of America’s most popular, and dangerous, sports that will be most appealing to NASCAR fans.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4489-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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