A straight-edged, readable memoir that will do little to polish cycling’s tarnished reputation.
With action/lifestyle sports broadcaster Hummer, world-class cyclist Hincapie recounts his career spent in the shadow of disgraced champion Lance Armstrong.
It’s tough to determine whether the fairly recent resurgence of popular interest in competitive cycling is due to the racing itself or to the doping controversy that has surrounded it for the past decade. Whatever the case, the now-retired former cycling phenom Hincapie feels compelled to share his story with the world. Unlike prima donnas like Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton, the author’s role in many Tour de France (and other) international cycling victories was mainly one of team-oriented strategy in making sure his team’s star member shined as brightly as possible in every race. Of course, this more secondary role still won Hincapie plenty of accolades, but it also did not prevent him from eventually indulging in the same sort of illegal performance-enhancing drugs that Armstrong and most of the other stars of the sport were using. It’s interesting to note that Hincapie’s depiction of Armstrong rarely acknowledges Armstrong’s nasty competitive side, owing most likely to the fact that Hincapie never seriously challenged Armstrong and so never caught the full wrath of the world’s foremost cycling celebrity. The author is not exactly contrite when it comes to his role in the doping scandals, either: Like Armstrong and other PED users, Hincapie saw doping as an unfortunate but necessary evil. Much like Hamilton’s The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France (2012), this book ultimately serves to tear away the gentlemanly facade of competitive cycling to reveal the sport’s profoundly unromantic underbelly.
A straight-edged, readable memoir that will do little to polish cycling’s tarnished reputation.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-233091-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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