Three-time Olympic gold medalist Joyner-Kersee, with Sports Illustrated editor Steptoe, delivers an autobiography that outshines much of the dismal competition. Track star Joyner grew up in the impoverished city of East St. Louis, playing basketball and running track despite family hardships and community hostility to girls' athletics, and going to UCLA on an athletic scholarship (Joyner-Kersee makes good use of her UCLA history education; aspects of her life—her father's employment troubles and her own athletic opportunites, for instance—are skillfully placed in a sociopolitical context). Her parents divorced soon after she left home. Her mother died of a rare bacterial infection, and her death is wrenchingly described, as is the author's painful decision to take her mother off life-support. She is honest about her family—her problems with her father's hard drinking and bullying, and her complex relationship with her strong-willed husband and coach, Bobby Kersee. Her brother, Olympic gold medalist Al Joyner, and his wife, Florence (``Flo Jo'') Griffith Joyner, eventually stopped using Bobby as their coach; oddly, Joyner-Kersee leaves this break unexplained. Readers are reassured that everyone has moved on and gotten over it, but one can't help wanting to know what happened. Flo was widely quoted at the time as saying that Bobby had a ``cultlike'' coaching style. Did she really say that? We'll never know. Also frustrating is Joyner's tendency—shared by many other athletes—to present the most banal personal revelations as wisdom worth sharing with others: ``Today might look gloomy, but tomorrow will be bright'' is one such pearl. Despite some omissions and lapses into pseudo-inspiration, this is frank and lucid, and presents an intimate picture of a star athlete and her sport. (8 pages b&w photo insert, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52248-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
