A moving, maddening look at a storied partnership that might have been a beautiful friendship as well.
Journalist and historian Pomerantz (Writing and Reporting/Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism; Their Life’s Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now, 2013, etc.) delivers a sturdy work at the intersection of sports history and race relations.
Bob Cousy, one of the best point guards ever, came up at a time when players had little representation or power. Yet he was seemingly fearless, and not just in pushing back when he disagreed with tough-as-nails coach Red Auerbach or the front office. (When Auerbach said of Cousy’s fancy dribbling and passing, “the criterion of a great passer is the completion of the pass,” Cousy’s reply was, “after a man had played with me for a few weeks…there is no excuse for his being fooled.”) As captain, Cousy built a well-oiled machine that got more powerful with the addition of Bill Russell at center. Yet this was the late 1950s, and though Cousy had organized the first successful NBA players’ union, he could do nothing about the racism Russell faced, as when he tried to buy a house in the suburbs to find that the “white neighbors there objected strenuously”—then broke into his house and “defecated in his bed.” Russell responded bitterly that he played for the Celtics but emphatically not for Boston. His emergence as a powerful voice for the civil rights movement didn’t win him any fans in Southie, especially when he said, “we have got to make the white population uncomfortable and keep it uncomfortable, because that is the only way to get their attention.” The author’s reportage and research are thoroughly up to the stuff of the standard sports biography, but the narrative acquires its greatest force when, long after the events described, Cousy expresses regret that he didn’t do more to support Russell: “I [ran] into literally my first angry black man….I think this simply scared me off.” Nor has Russell mellowed—and nor should he.
A moving, maddening look at a storied partnership that might have been a beautiful friendship as well.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2361-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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