Atkinson (Writing/Boston Univ.; Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America, 2010, etc.) takes readers on an exuberant journey into the center of the rugby scrum.
As a 35-year veteran of the sport, the author’s passion translates easily to the page, providing a reflective look at his entrance into what he dubs the “blood fraternity.” Atkinson makes no attempt to hide his zeal for the sport, explaining, “There are the things we do for love, and the things we do for rugby…” Atkinson addresses both, examining his struggle to serve two competing mistresses, writing and rugby. Throughout his graduate studies at the University of Florida, Atkinson began to understand the overlapping traits required for writers and rugby players alike: “grit, aggression, physical courage, loyalty, chivalry, insouciance and comic self-awareness…” While Atkinson attempted to hone these skills, he became distracted—not by his sport, but by its culture. When not on the pitch, the author and teammates forged their bonds in the bars, partaking in the usual rabble-rousing (including bar fights and the occasional run-in with the law). Yet Atkinson’s hijinks came to a halt when he learned of the death of his father, a life-changing event that forced him to confront emotional pain in addition to his physical pain. Though an overseas rugby tour helped him through his grief, it was not the sport that healed him, but the lessons learned from its grueling trials. A testosterone-laden tale deserving of an audience well beyond the locker room.
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-54769-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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