A flawed yet unique, personal story of an athlete's anguish at the end of his career.
A revealing yet occasionally tedious, seasonlong account of a major league pitcher on the outs.
Toronto Blue Jays broadcaster Hayhurst (Out of My League, 2012, etc.) began what would be his final season in 2010 training "like a beast" and anticipating the publication of his book, The Bullpen Gospels, on opening day. However, he had to win over skeptics who believed anyone who wrote from the inside violated the locker room code and therefore could never be trusted as reliable. Furthermore, talking to the press corps during spring training to garner publicity for his book caused teammates to question his motives, particularly a cocky, malicious pitcher who nicknamed him "Media," and encouraged several teammates to turn against him. Hayhurst wanted to prove he belonged, but he started the season relegated to the training room on the 60-day disabled list with an arm injury—and it only got worse. The combination of prolonged pain and social ostracism made him panicky, and the author admits, "it was a delicate balance of trying to get healthy physically and not unraveling mentally into some anxious, why-am-I-not-healthy mess.” Rarely does an athlete admit publicly to feeling anxious, afraid or depressed, but Hayhurst candidly shows readers that he was fraying both emotionally and physically. (One line sums it up nicely: "Arm pain can make your whole life hurt.") However, the author draws out his emotionally honest story with unnecessary, lengthy accounts of interactions with coaches and trainers, as well as intimate conversations with his wife. Several chapters devoted to his rehabilitation program lend no insight or deeper understanding of his pain.
A flawed yet unique, personal story of an athlete's anguish at the end of his career.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3487-9
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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