Besides offering a solid chronological biography and record of Michael Jordan's basketball career, here Naughton (My Brother Stealing Second, 1989) also gives an astute assessment of this superstar's impact on society and of ``the conflict between self and symbol'' for an American icon. The ``most successfully marketed athlete in the history of team sports,'' ``Air'' Jordan's popularity transcends the basketball court and, according to Naughton, the racial boundaries encountered by other black athletes and celebrities. Examining Jordan's development from his youth through his emotional catharsis after the 1991 NBA championship, the author finds a man possessed by the need to compete and excel—but one also steeped in the values of family and charity. A member of the 1984 Olympic team following his illustrious career at the Univ. of North Carolina, Jordan's impact on the NBA was felt almost immediately, both on and off the court. His incredible acrobatics and scoring sprees, combined with his unprecedented $2.5 million, five-year contract with Nike and his persistent confrontation with the Chicago Bulls' front office over personnel decisions, marked him as a man apart, one who would become ``bigger than the game he played.'' Jordan's phenomenal appeal is grounded in part, Naughton argues, ``in the public's perception that fame has not spoiled him.'' Handsome, soft-spoken, and seemingly approachable, Jordan is the black embodiment of a Horatio Alger character. Naughton perceptively notes that other black superstars find that their success ``has not been taken as a sign of racial worthiness, but as a sign of genetic peculiarity.'' Despite Jordan's success, however, Naughton says that the player thus far ``has neither encountered the circumstances nor taken the risks that would make him a truly forceful actor in the nation's racial drama.'' Insightful and well written: a fine analysis of the business side of sports and of the creation of a modern legend. (Eight-page photo insert.)
Pub Date: March 12, 1992
ISBN: 0-446-51629-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
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