With light humor and darker emotion, Buck candidly calls the game of his own life.
An Emmy-winning sportscaster—and son of broadcasting legend Jack Buck—rehearses his life with early frivolity and later gravity.
In the first few pages, readers may think they’re seated in coach with a jokester and are in for an interminable flight. But soon the “jockular” surrenders to the more thoughtful, and, by the end, readers will know a lot about the longtime FOX sportscaster. Several times Buck declares that he knows he’s the beneficiary of great fortune—he had a paved pathway into his profession—but he also confesses some insecurities (we get much detail about his hair-plug operations and his issues with weight), one of the most significant of which was his having to follow his father. Buck sometimes pauses in his chronology to reflect on friends, failures, awkward on- and off-air moments, and successes—to his credit, he does not dwell too long on these. Although he discusses his failed marriage, he does not convey with absolute certainty what caused the collapse; some general comments about decay and unhappiness suffice. Still, he remains self-deprecating throughout, confessing his weaknesses, including what he has perceived as a failure to be as emotional as he thinks he should be on the air. (He says he has worked to remedy that.) The author writes affectingly about the decline and death of his father and about the near loss of his own voice following a hair-plug surgery. He also writes enthusiastically about FOX Sports, his longtime professional home, and takes only a few potshots at other sports journalists—Phil Mushnick and Keith Olbermann among them. He heaps praise on Mike Tirico (the best, he says), Al Michaels, and Bob Costas, and he ends with a brief discussion of his recent tattoos.
With light humor and darker emotion, Buck candidly calls the game of his own life.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-98456-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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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