Winner of 11 PGA tournaments between 1963 and 1971, Beard, whose golf game and life later ``went to pieces'' because of alcoholism, joined the money-rich Senior Tour in 1989. Here, with the help of Sports Illustrated writer Garrity, he records his every golf shot—and stray thought—on the 1991 circuit. Despite a second-place finish in the 1989 Senior Open, Beard has not become a big money-winner among the 50-and-over pros. The 1991 Senior Tour hosted 42 events with a total purse of $24 million. Beard took home $150,000 in 23 events; Jack Nicklaus, ``the best player who ever lived,'' won $343,734 in just five. The big money, Beard emphasizes, is not shelled out for quality golf or some notion of fierce competition: The ``Senior Tour is built on nostalgia,'' plain and simple, with spectators paying to watch old pros such as Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Lee Trevino, Chi Chi Rodriguez, and Sam Snead play together one more time. Often controversial, Beard, who writes a column for Golf World magazine, profiles some of his peers and discusses long-standing rivalries and often petty disputes; grouses about playing ``outings,'' pro- ams for charity for which the pros are paid; complains about caddie fees; and gives a lot of space to describing golf he's watched on TV. A recovering alcoholic, he attends from one to three AA meetings a week and sees a sports psychologist: ``When I play badly I see myself as a bad person.'' His worries about his swing and his confidence are duly noted in the epilogue: ``[my] nervousness and fear jump off the pages.'' And straying yet further from the links, he feels compelled to share even his views on evolution and creation. Fine when Beard stays on the golf course; preachy and self- indulgent when he doesn't.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-508060-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
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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