This thorough, absorbing biography is also a history of golf in America and how one man taught so many how to hit a golf...
A biography of the humble Texas golfer who taught greats of the game and whose little instructional guide became the best-selling golf book of all time.
When Harvey Penick (1904-1995) died at age 90, Ben Crenshaw, one of Penick’s students, was preparing for the Masters. He immediately flew home for the funeral; such was his love for Harvey. He would win the Masters for the second time later that week. Austin journalist Robbins’ (Journalism/Univ. of Texas) first book is a gracious and endearing biography of Penick, about whom fellow Texan Byron Nelson, one of the game’s greatest players, proclaimed, he “knows as much about the basics of golf as any man in the world.” Penick was born and raised in Austin and lived near the city’s first golf course his entire life. In 1913, when he was 8, he began caddying at the course to make some money. Robbins writes that the young boy now “knew right where he was supposed to be.” He practiced hard, with purpose. Always the student, he memorized the “variables that produced the best shots” and meticulously wrote down his thoughts in a small notebook. At 12, he was made shop assistant and automatically became one of America’s first pros. At 17, he played in his first tournament and later competed against Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen. Club members—and pros—were anxious to get lessons from the quiet, circumspect young pro who studied swings like an “anthropologist…encountering a new civilization.” In 1992, three years before he died, a publisher paid a large advance for his Little Red Book. Robbins seems to have interviewed everyone who ever knew Penick, and he provides great anecdotes and stories about and from his most accomplished students, including Betsy Rawls, Mickey Wright, and Tom Kite.
This thorough, absorbing biography is also a history of golf in America and how one man taught so many how to hit a golf ball so well.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-14849-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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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