A modest, beguiling biography that brilliantly mirrors its understated and remarkable subject.
This straightforward, enthusiastic biography by Eichinger and Everson recounts the life story of Eric Liddell, the Olympic athlete whose achievements inspired the iconic movie Chariots of Fire.
The opening sequence of Chariots of Fire—men running barefoot on a Scottish beach backed by a soundtrack scored by Vangelis—is one of the most enduring scenes in cinema. Ironically, the subject of the movie, Eric Liddell, once one of the most famous men in Britain, is perhaps now less well-known than that scene. Eichinger and Everson’s biography seeks to redress this by reilluminating a remarkable life. Liddell was born in China, the second son of Scottish missionaries. At 5, he and his brother Robert were enrolled in a boarding school in London while their parents continued their work in the Far East. From competing as a university freshman and taking a “shocking first in the 100 meters” against Edinburgh’s fastest sprinter to winning gold in the 400 meters at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Liddell led a life of achievement and victory. Yet he is maybe more famous for declining to compete in the 100-meter event of that same Olympics due to his religious respect for the Christian Sabbath. The biography charts his lifelong relationship with God, from his early curiosity with the intersection of science and theology to his work as a missionary in his later years. Short openings to chapters imagine key moments in Liddell’s life: “Eric stretched his legs from the seat he’d nearly collapsed into, one directly opposite the seat his friend slouched on. He glanced out the small window of the train, smudged with a child’s fingerprints from an earlier passage, to the platform on the other side.” These elegantly written passages are elaborated on with factual, to-the-point details: “The physical exertion through sport and competition was a welcome break from his daily pedagogical aerobics. Simply put, running gave his mind a rest.” The biography is occasionally oversentimental; Duncan Hamilton’s For the Glory: Eric Liddell’s Journey from Olympic Champion to Modern Martyr suffers the same pitfall. The authors’ admiration for, and fascination with, Liddell, however, is palpable on every page, demonstrated by the depth of research and the care taken to preserve his legacy.
A modest, beguiling biography that brilliantly mirrors its understated and remarkable subject.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4964-1994-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tyndale Momentum
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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