A moving hagiography that will appeal to fans of Chariots of Fire as well as Unbroken and similar books.
The life of the deeply Christian Olympic champion runner who forsook the glory for missionary work in China. The story was the basis for the award-winning film Chariots of Fire.
British sportswriter Hamilton (Touch Wood: The Autobiography of the 1953 Le Mans Winner, 2014, etc.) re-creates the life of Eric Liddell (1902-1944), the Scottish son of missionaries who sensationally won the gold medal in the 400-meter race at the Summer Olympics in Paris in 1924 before becoming a missionary in China like his father. Liddell was an unlikely sports hero, not physically prepossessing but absolutely determined, and he gained inspiration from German Max Sick’s How to Become a Great Athlete while a student at the University of Edinburgh. At the same time, he became a committed member and minister for the Union Church. Discovered by impresario-coach Tom McKerchar, Liddell soon smartened up as an athlete, winning numerous championship races with his unique head-thrown-back style. The 400-meter race was not his specialty, and he was not a favorite of the British Olympic Association, which “didn’t consider a Scot…as an important figure.” Yet when the Olympic schedule was organized, Liddell refused to race his specialty 100 meters because it was scheduled on a Sunday. Considered a traitor to his country by some, he was soon celebrated as a national hero once he won the 400. In his often poignant but also sometimes overly sentimental narrative, Hamilton emphasizes that this was only the beginning of the Liddell legend, as he sought a higher calling as a missionary, moving to the land of his birth, Tientsin, China, to teach science and sports at the Anglo-Chinese College. With the Japanese invasion, however, the expatriate community became vulnerable to attack and then imprisonment in concentration camps like Weihsien, where Liddell spent 694 days practicing his faith and helping other inmates before dying tragically of an undiagnosed brain tumor.
A moving hagiography that will appeal to fans of Chariots of Fire as well as Unbroken and similar books.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-620-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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