Will appeal to cycling enthusiasts and readers who seek an honest explanation of the scandals sullying the sport.
Engagingly straightforward recollections of a champion athlete who succumbed to the dark side of illegal performance enhancement.
Cyclist Millar was a contender for the British Olympic team when he was arrested in 2004 by French authorities as part of their investigation into the Cofidis racing team. Unlike many athletes, the author chose to cooperate and was forthright about his disgrace. While accepting responsibility for his actions, he notes a willful blindness throughout the cycling establishment—“Cofidis had fundamentally failed when it came to preventing doping”—and he tries to convey the enormous pressures faced by neophyte athletes. Millar rose quickly as a young amateur cyclist, and his passion is evident in the focus on the technical side of racing. He portrays competitive cycling as a macho, closed society under close scrutiny. However, he writes, cycling officials tolerated an insidious culture of performance boosting and "recovery" that started with obscure, quasi-legal measures. After a few physically tortuous years of high-stakes races, the use of illegal substances came to seem inevitable, though the guilt and stress destroyed the happiness he’d found in riding. After he came clean to a French judge and the British Cycling governing body, he was banned from competition for two years (and banned from the Olympics for life). His forthright tone makes his downfall seem relatable: “I had become completely removed from my sport…I wasn’t an athlete anymore.” He ultimately received an opportunity to redeem himself with a smaller team, Saunier Duval, making his comeback at 29 in the 2006 Tour de France, just as the event was roiled by yet another doping scandal. Such events support Millar’s core argument that only candor about the seamy aspects of high-stakes athletics might allow problems like doping to be addressed.
Will appeal to cycling enthusiasts and readers who seek an honest explanation of the scandals sullying the sport.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-8268-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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
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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