Captures Thorpe’s breathtaking highs and heartrending lows, but falls just short of his all-around excellence.
An impeccably researched biography of one of the world’s greatest all-around athletes, a symbol of racial injustice and untapped potential.
This retrospective is not the first to tackle the complex life of Jim Thorpe (1888–1953), but it’s the most comprehensive. From his childhood in Oklahoma to career as a struggling actor a half-century later, journalist and biographer Buford (Burt Lancaster, 2000) chronicles a life filled with incomparable athletic achievements, government-sanctioned discrimination and wasted opportunities. Mischievous, overly generous, prone to alcoholism and habitually restless, Thorpe gained prominence on the gridiron at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an Indian boarding school where the half-Caucasian, half-Indian halfback played for legendary coach Pop Warner. He exploded into public consciousness in 1912, leading Carlisle to a national championship and winning gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon in the Olympics. Controversy arose, however, as a prior dalliance in professional baseball would result in his medals being stripped (a lifelong struggle to restore them ensued, though they would not be returned until decades after his death). Stints as a professional baseball and football player followed, but Thorpe’s poor fielding precluded stardom in the former, while the latter’s nascent status resulted in less-lucrative opportunities than his talents warranted. After his prodigious athletic gifts deteriorated, he constantly struggled with marital problems, finding work and fiscal insolvency. The 1951 movie Jim Thorpe—All American immortalized him, though when he died two years later, more than four years passed before his remains were laid to rest in the newly christened Jim Thorpe, Pa.—a result of family, community and government squabbles. Buford’s attention to detail is largely a strength, but it occasionally breeds long stretches in which the minutiae of Thorpe’s endless cycle of hopeful new beginnings followed by failures to capitalize obscure the narrative core—the tragedy of a groundbreaking athlete succumbing to obstacles both external (and unjust) and internal (and self-inflicted).
Captures Thorpe’s breathtaking highs and heartrending lows, but falls just short of his all-around excellence.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-41324-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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