Sometimes accused of being a complainer on the court, Boeheim comes across as likable in this readable, thoughtful book...
An autobiography from a legendary coaching lifer.
In 1962, Boeheim (b. 1944), a native of tiny Lyons, New York, walked on to the Syracuse University basketball team as a lightly touted freshman, eventually earning a scholarship. In the fall of 2014, he will begin his 39th season as head coach of the Orange. In 2003, Boeheim won the national championship after several near misses, and in 2006, he was elected to the coaches’ wing of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Only Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski has more wins in the history of Division I. In this memoir, Boeheim’s voice rings through clearly, a tribute to both the coach and to his co-author, McCallum, a respected veteran basketball writer (Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever, 2012, etc.). Boeheim keeps his focus on the college game, its evolution and his experience as the most visible person at Syracuse, although he shares relevant details of his personal biography as well. Basketball junkies will especially value the coach’s insights. Every two or three chapters, Boeheim breaks up the narrative with one of nine multipage “coaches notes” from the 2013-2014 season; these provide additional insight into Boeheim’s passion and preparation as well as his philosophies in dealing with players, officials, and peers on and off the court. Syracuse was an inaugural member of the Big East Conference that helped to transform college basketball in the 1980s, highlighting a tough, hard-fought style of play and larger-than-life coaching personalities, of which Boeheim was one of the more prominent. The tales from the Big East in its heyday mark some of the highlights of the book, as do his coaching insights.
Sometimes accused of being a complainer on the court, Boeheim comes across as likable in this readable, thoughtful book about coaching college basketball.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0062316646
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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