Sure to send readers in search of the highlight reel.
The bittersweet tale of Pistol Pete, one of basketball’s most talented and tragic legends.
Pete Maravich, born in 1947, was groomed from birth to be the best basketball player of all time. His father, Press, was his coach and taskmaster; the pair functioned as extensions of each other. Kriegel (Namath, 2004) begins by expounding at length on Press’s hardscrabble youth, when basketball became his salvation and his life. Press imbued his son with every ounce of his ambition. It didn’t take long for Pete, fanatical about perfecting every drill he was taught, to display an almost preternatural affinity for basketball. Pistol Pete integrated flawless fundamentals with showy moves. As his legend grew and he became the “great white hope” of the NBA, the weight of expectations crushed his free spirit, which was further battered by his mother’s 1974 suicide. His thin frame began to break down, and old-school coaches who didn’t appreciate Pete’s talent lessened his competitive fire. He sought comfort in everything from alcohol to belief in extraterrestrials. Despite spurts of brilliance and a reputation as one of the most talented players of all time, he walked away from the NBA in 1980, after ten seasons, with no championship ring. He would find happiness in Jesus and his family until a heart attack during a pickup match ended his life at the age of 40. Kriegel occasionally lingers too long on Press, but his son emerges in this compelling, nuanced account as a man both talented and complex.
Sure to send readers in search of the highlight reel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8497-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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