A bright, uplifting biography about determination and giving back.
The inspiring life of a Ugandan middle-distance runner and his journey from bush village to Olympic hopeful.
Julius Achon was born during Idi Amin’s terrifying reign. A firstborn son who barely survived a potentially fatal measles outbreak, he became charged with the care of his siblings after being frequently abandoned by his herdsman father, who spent the family’s meager income on alcohol and gambling. At age 12, Achon was captured by the Lord’s Resistance Army and physically and mentally primed for combat. His already “sinuous, efficient, straight-backed stride” and fierce running speed allowed him to escape during an ambush attack and return home. In this segment, sports journalist Brant (Duel in the Sun: Alberto Salazar, Dick Beardsley, and America’s Greatest Marathon, 2006) demonstrates his flair for building suspense. Achon’s father advised him to learn to run and “become like John Akii-Bua,” who won the gold medal in the 400-meter hurdles at the 1972 Olympics. Empowered and increasingly fearless, the young man trained relentlessly and began advancing in contests within larger arenas and eventually paid for boarding school. In the mid-1990s, having relocated to America, Achon swiftly ascended the competitive ranks in more challenging races. While attending George Mason University, his coach cautioned him not to become preoccupied with the “African witch-doctor tribal stuff, all this rebel civil war junk” in his past. Professional racing beckoned, as did Olympic trials, but after a bittersweet reunion back in Uganda, a return to the States was dampened by the news of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the LRA. Achon refocused himself with more philanthropic endeavors, including a children’s fund financed by a businessman eager to construct an ultramodern medical facility back in Uganda. With breezy, accessible prose, Brant’s profile incorporates African history and insider details on the physical demands of race-running, strategies for success, and how Achon personally paved the way for others like him to succeed with pride and humanitarianism both on the track and in everyday life.
A bright, uplifting biography about determination and giving back.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-39215-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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