A readable, inspiring memoir about staying true to dreams and principles in a world that too often forces personal...
The unflinching account of U.S. women's soccer team member Solo's life on and off the field.
Born in Richland, Wash., a plutonium-producing town "created in the dark shadows of the American dream," Solo came from a family that "[didn't] do happy endings.” Her father was a philandering con man who married her mother while still serving a prison sentence for embezzlement. When Solo was 7, he kidnapped her and her brother Marcus from their mother; after he was arrested, she did not see him again for many years. But the damage had already been done. Her home life was fraught with tension that manifested as fights between Solo and her brother and alcoholism in her mother. She found refuge in sports and excelled as a soccer player. By the time she was a high school junior, she had caught the eye of college coaches across the country. Solo chose the University of Washington, where she lived a double life as a respected college athlete and a national soccer team member while gradually rebuilding a relationship with her now-homeless father. Dreaming of World Cup glory, Solo then played for professional teams in the U.S., Sweden and France while continuing to train with the American national team. Never one to hold back, she speaks with great honesty about the difficulty of living in the shadow of the 1999 World Cup championship team. She also reflects thoughtfully on her infamous benching at the 2007 World Cup competition and how the misunderstanding it caused nearly ruined her reputation and professional standing. Through heartache, setbacks and career-threatening injuries, Solo demonstrates not only a fierce determination to overcome, but also the grace of a true champion.
A readable, inspiring memoir about staying true to dreams and principles in a world that too often forces personal compromise.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-213674-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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