Indifferently written, but a useful character study of a figure often overlooked today.
Serviceable biography of the legendary player who, writes debut author Poole, was the “one man who could be considered the founding father of our football culture.”
Make that our big-media, big-money sports culture generally. Red Grange, renowned beginning in the 1920s for breakaway, full-field runs that gave his version of the game the appearance of rugby, was football’s Babe Ruth. He may have been slightly cleaner-living and certainly more photogenic, but he was also just as deeply implicated in the transformation of a backlot, democratic game into a machine that could make considerable fortunes for a few lucky players and owners. Matched with an unscrupulous manager, Grange was soon at the pinnacle of the system; by 1928, Poole reckons, he was earning more than $3.4 million per year “in an era when athletes were not highly compensated.” Confronted with owners who wouldn’t see things his way, he also cooked up a wildcat league that, for various reasons, wound up diminishing his reputation while strengthening the regular league “because more skilled professional players were now available, making the NFL game fundamentally faster and better played.” Cause and effect here and elsewhere is a little sketchy, and Poole’s prose is a bit clunky (“Red could not have hidden his pain, his thoughts about the inevitable, the future. Red needed a knee specialist. He needed rest.”). But the valuable part of the narrative is a story that many sports fans will not know, or at least know only in outline—namely, the increasing blurring of sports figure and cultural celebrity in the Depression era, especially once Hollywood began to recruit sports stars to turn up in all sorts of B-list productions. That blurring, after all, is what defines sports figures today, and Grange was an indisputable pioneer.
Indifferently written, but a useful character study of a figure often overlooked today.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-69163-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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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