Despite a muddled narrative, a haunting portrait of discord emerges.
A founder of ESPN opens a window into his dysfunctional family.
Early on in this unsettling memoir, Rasmussen makes a candid statement about his oldest brother: “Bill entered this world as the perfect baby that became the perfect son, who could do no wrong. And so it would be for the rest of our parents’ lives.” The book covers a lot of ground, from Rasmussen’s boyhood baseball exploits and his serving with the Air Force in Greenland to helping get the ESPN sports network off and running. But its emotional core is his account of a toxic family to which, even from early childhood, he “felt that I didn't belong.” Rasmussen’s parents were forced into marriage after his mother got pregnant. After a daughter was stillborn, his brother Bill was born about 18 months later. He was the “savior” of the marriage, “the anointed one,” while Don, another brother Bob, and sister Vivien “were literally excess baggage.” Don is the “problem child” who spends his “whole life trying to be a part of and accepted as a part of my family.” According to Rasmussen, it was his father and Bill who teamed up to dash his dreams of playing professional baseball in an effort to “maintain [Bill’s] dominance.” The fledgling ESPN gives the family an opportunity to go into business together, but the venture dissolves in acrimony, with Don’s lawyer telling him, “I have never met anyone as nasty as Bill” and that he should try not to be too disappointed about never having a positive relationship with his family. Rasmussen concludes that “no amount of denial can cover the lifelong meanness…that I submitted to.” Rasmussen’s message is diluted by a jumbled narrative structure that hops confusingly between time periods when a linear approach would have been more effective. But the book paints a haunting picture of family dysfunction, and the author’s journey brings him to the hopeful realization that he “survived both [Bill] and Dad and their attempts to keep me down.”
Despite a muddled narrative, a haunting portrait of discord emerges.Pub Date: June 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482742022
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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