A marginally funny exposÇ of life on the European pro golf circuit. According to Donegan, a Manchester Guardian reporter who masqueraded as a pro caddy during the 1996 European PGA tour, “caddying is . . . not brain surgery. It is much more complicated than that.” From this clumsy metaphor-cum-witticism, we might surmise that Donegan wields turns of phrase about as effectively as he wielded a golf bag (and we need only read the subtitle to see how well he did that). But seriously, the author seems quite genial, and is always willing to be the butt of his own joke (perhaps this is because the Milquetoast personalities of the European PGA tour provide little fodder for the author’s japes). However, his stories about the erratic quality of tournaments on a circuit that included such golfing meccas as Dubai, Czech Republic, Morocco, and Austria, or the boozy, vagabond lifestyles of caddies and the less successful golfers, begin to sound familiar (see any of the dozens of other golf books published over the past few years). Basically, Donegan played Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, Ross Drummond, a mid-table tour pro whose delusions of greatness and outsized ego often serve as grist for the author’s mill (though not as often as the occurrence of Cervantes references used by the author to describe their relationship). What ensues is Drummond enjoying tantalizing glimpses of success that he, to the author’s consternation, attributes to every factor (including the teachings of the self-help guru Anthony Robbins) other than good caddying; Drummond and Donegan parting ways; and Donegan looking to land one-shot tournament caddying assignments. Par for the course, as golf books go.
Pub Date: June 16, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18584-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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