Recommended for any sports enthusiast and a must for golfers of all handicaps.
An exciting story of the “terror…absolute joy and absolute despair” that are the Ryder Cup matches.
Noted sports columnist and prolific author Feinstein (The Legends Club: Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano, and an Epic College Basketball Rivalry, 2016, etc.) returns to the world of golf with this in-depth portrait of the dramatic 2016 Ryder Cup matches between the U.S. and European teams at the Hazeltine Golf Course in Minnesota. Golf fans love Feinstein’s books because he’s trusted by the pros and thus can give inside information no other journalist can capture, plus he has a flair for telling a great story. He’s been waiting 23 years to write a book about the Ryder Cup, and he covers a lot of material here. The author begins at the end of the matches, with Ryan Moore (the last American to make the team) putting to win the matches for the U.S., the first win since 2008. He provides a succinct history of the matches, which began in 1926, before moving on to more detailed tales about the most recent ones and the key players involved in them. Then it’s on to the 2016 competition. He provides terrific behind-the-scenes information about how Davis Love was chosen as team captain for the second time in a row as well as the scrap between Phil Mickelson and Tom Watson and how Love decided to implement a strategy similar to what captain Paul Azinger used in the American’s 2008 victory: the task force, which gave “the players the input they needed to be prepared to succeed.” The opening ceremony had seating for 1,500. There were some 45,000 on the course, and 30,000 stayed for the ceremony. Feinstein’s coverage of the actual matches only takes up about a quarter of the book, and his journalistic style of short, pithy paragraphs drives the narrative along at breakneck speed.
Recommended for any sports enthusiast and a must for golfers of all handicaps.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54109-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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