Top jockey Krone's memoir might better be titled ``Everything I Need to Know I Learned at the Racetrack.'' Krone, 31, is the ``winningest female jockey'' ever—and one of the winningest jockeys, period. She (with Richardson, coauthor of Feel No Fear, 1994) opens dramatically with her ankle-crushing fall at Saratoga in 1993, right on the heels of her greatest triumph, at the Belmont Stakes, where she became the first woman to win a Triple Crown race. Her spritely nature comes through in this honest—maybe too honest—book, but so does a huge dose of sentimentality. We learn of her gratitude to and love for all the friends and professionals, from trainer John Forbes to jockey Mike Smith, who have taught her love, loyalty, sacrifice, and what it means to be a jockey. This saccharine quality, a kind of naive openness, comes through even as she relates her many adversities- -her parents' divorce when she was 13, teenage loneliness, her mother's bout with ovarian cancer, and the trial of being a woman in a man's sport. A rare exception is the rousing chapter in which she relates her physical battles with male colleagues who use their whips as offensive weapons—like Miguel Rujano, who whips her across the face after she wins a race. One can't help regretting the lesson she learned from the Monmouth Park steward, who told her to act like ``a lady'' at the track. Ultimately, the book's only intersting lesson is how she learned to win a race—how she strategizes and gets to know the personality of each of her mounts. Here she illuminates the unique quality of horse racing: the woman/horse bond, the melding of talents that wins the race. Much of this book could be the autobiography of any young woman. It's Krone's passion for riding that distinguishes her—she should stick to the horsey stuff.
Pub Date: May 5, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-50477-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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