This book about "old men and their war stories" is full of golf lore and will be a pleasure for fans and historians of the...
A sportswriter embarks on a "legends tour" to discover the experiences of both the biggest and the uncelebrated names and contests in golf and capture those veteran players "as they actually are" today.
In leisurely, detailed interviews, Sports Illustrated senior writer Bamberger (The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, 2006, etc.) reveals the characters of the greats of the game and the contexts of their celebrated tournaments and achievements. Though he doesn’t necessarily think things were better “back in the day,” he admires how "in Arnold [Palmer]'s day, the Masters Tournament was charming and clubby and genteel.” (Bamberger admits only in passing that "Augusta National is not a place where change comes quickly”; indeed, the guardians at that storied club, which was founded in 1932 and has hosted the Masters since 1934, didn't allow women as members until 2012, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore received membership.) The author clearly appreciates the members of the Greatest Generation and their "old-school, fly-straight, DIY values, golfing and otherwise,” but he also recognizes the need for change. About the camaraderie among golfers in these exclusive, country-club environments, he cleverly writes, “golf is [a] book group for men." Though Bamberger is awestruck by his subjects—see the dozens of pages devoted to Arnold Palmer—and enamored with the game, his prose is thankfully straightforward and free of sanctimony or syrupy, romantic sentiments, and his interviews and game accounts are extensive without being tedious.
This book about "old men and their war stories" is full of golf lore and will be a pleasure for fans and historians of the game, specifically the era between the 1950s and the 1970s.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4382-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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