An almost too-meticulous record of Thoroughbred racing’s greatest champion.
A slow-out-of-the-gate biography of Thoroughbred legend Man o’ War (a relation of Seabiscuit) that eventually crosses the finish line with a flourish.
The #1 American racehorse of the 20th century set an unprecedented number of speed records in his two-year racing career. Born in 1917, the colt was named not after a warship but in tribute of his owner, August Belmont, who, although 65 years old at the outbreak of World War I, quickly volunteered to serve his country. By 1918, Belmont, busy with the war effort, was forced to close his racing stable, and Man o’ War was bought by Sam Riddle, at the urging of his wife and his trainer. The rest is history: The colt, known as Big Red, began setting speed records. Of 21 races, he lost only one, the controversial 1919 Sanford Memorial Stakes to two-year-old Upset. Ours provides a wealth of statistics that makes for slow reading—Man o’ War’s speed at each furlong of every race, his incredible 25-foot-long stride, a track record that would remain unbroken for more than 70 years. A plethora of detail about figures including owner Riddle, jockey Johnny Loftus and trainer Lou Feustel hamper the narrative as well. Sadly, we don’t learn much about the personality of Big Red, a horse “so fidgety that he bit his hooves after lying down at night.” The highlight of the book is an exciting description of Man o’ War’s final run, a match race against another crowd favorite, Sir Barton, in Canada’s Kenilworth Park.
An almost too-meticulous record of Thoroughbred racing’s greatest champion.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34099-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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