A golf-is-life allegory that fails to make the cut.
Novelist and memoirist Snyder (The Winter Travelers: A Christmas Fable, 2011, etc.) returns with the overwrought story of his training to be a caddie so he could help his son, who hopes for a PGA career.
Written in the form of a journal, the book proceeds from late 2006 to early 2012, when the author’s son, Jack, after a winter’s discontent with tournament golf, decided he would surrender his athletic dreams. Snyder begins by declaring he wants to stay close to his son because he never wanted “to lose him the way my father had lost me.” He describes his 2007 decision to go to Scotland, where he lived frugally, often out of contact with his wife, son and daughters, to learn caddying. Jack made the golf team at the University of Toledo but was dropped from the team (poor grades), greatly disappointing the author, who wrestles throughout with this turn of events. Snyder, a talkative father, rarely misses an opportunity to preach to his son. The clichés flow in an endless stream—keep trying, don’t give up, life is a struggle, “it’s the mistakes that really determine the shape of our lives.” Often more telling than the words are the silences. The author rarely mentions his daughters (what do they think of all this?) and writes little about his wife, even though she didn’t see him for months. The author is not shy about self-promotion—we hear continually about his writing and how often his true grit has paid off—and he delivers some anti–Tiger Woods rants, as well.
A golf-is-life allegory that fails to make the cut.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-53635-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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