Lengthy, solid, revealing biography of the owner of the L.A. Raiders—and a knowledgeable history of football's evolution from the Sixties onward, on and off the field. Portrayed by Ribowsky (He's a Rebel, 1988) as a pretend- athlete who never made the teams but tenaciously sought the company of real jocks, Davis, through his blue-collar Raiders (``oddities and irregulars, factory seconds and seeming chain gang escapees'') became an outlaw force in football. Ribowsky covers Davis's story thoroughly, especially the 1982 battle with Commissioner Pete Rozelle over Davis's right to move the team from Oakland to L.A. Leading up to that, Ribowsky details the peculiarly nasty Raider style that developed as Davis welded hard-case nonconformists into victorious Super Bowl teams, and also delivers a lively account of the bombs-away style that has unnerved Raider opponents. Davis emerges as chutzpah incarnate in his independent rise from a well-to-do Jewish background to successful coach to preeminence in the sport. Here, as the driven, indefatigable Raider-mensch scouts for his psychopath berserkers, he guts business opponents along the way without mercy, retaining a cadre of loyalists in a sea of enemies. But Davis's relationships with his players, blacks included, have been as close as can be found in the sport. Doused after a victory, ``[Davis] wore the wet clothes all the way home,'' giggles one player. The enemies list is long, though, once headed by former Raiders-owner Wayne Valley, who gave Davis his biggest breaks: At Valley's funeral, ``The police were watching for him,'' says wife Gladys Valley. ``They had orders to throw him out.'' ``You don't want Al Davis mad at you,'' says Gene Upshaw, and Ribowsky's sometimes clunky sentences do not obscure his forceful underscoring of that message. (Two eight-page photo inserts—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-02-602500-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
