A year on the NASCAR circuit with the third Petty to leave his mark on racing history. With 12 years of only middling racing success, Petty has found living up to the family name a curse and a challenge—but occasionally a joy as well. His four wins going into the 1992 season, as Gaillard (The Dream Long Deferred, 1988, etc.) notes, hardly measured up to the great success of his father, Richard ``The King'' Petty, who boasts the most wins in NASCAR history, or of his grandfather Lee Petty, winner of the first Daytona 500 race. As Gaillard shows, while Kyle ``didn't wallow in the burden of being Richard Petty's son,'' it may not be entirely coincidental that Kyle's best season, 1992, was also his father's last: two wins; $1 million-plus in prize money; fifth in the Winston Cup point standings. It was also Kyle's ``comeback'' year, following his multiple-injury wreck in May 1991 at Talladega. Petty started the new season by wrecking his car, Mellow Yello, in a qualifying heat at Daytona—a race he was desperate to win—and managed only a sixth-place finish in a relatively untested backup car. He then captured his third straight pole position at Rockingham, where he won in 1990 and 1991, only to crack a cam shaft with 65 laps to go. The next several weeks were marked by frustrating mechanical problems and mishaps, but new crew-chief Robin Pemberton patched things together and Petty took second and third in races at Charlotte. Toward the end of the season, he had an outstanding five-week run of top-five finishes. As backdrop, Gaillard limns Petty family, and racing, history, as well as the careers of top drivers like Davey Allison, Bill Elliott, and Dale Earnhardt. Stalls occasionally but, overall, a fairly smooth trip around the track. (For an overview of NASCAR, turn to Peter Golenbock's American Zoom, p. 834.) (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09732-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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