The self-immolating trajectory of a display of hubris worthy of Aristophanes’ contempt, complete with the inevitable fall...
Washington Post reporter Leahy sees the legendary player’s sad return to professional basketball as a parable of all that is wrong with an industry that milks players of iconic status.
In 2000, the Washington Wizards hired Michael Jordan to be the club’s president. Surprise, surprise, writes Leahy: the move was made to capitalize on Jordan’s star power; principal owner Abe Pollin hoped to bolster the Wizards’ poor performance and, more importantly, to fill seats in the arena. Detailed by the Post to follow this story over the course of a year, the skeptical but evenhanded reporter chronicles Jordan’s abortive resurrection and explains what it was all about—essentially, money and entitlement. For the year and a half that Jordan served as a Wizards executive, he was at best an absentee landlord; later, as a player, he displayed the diminishing talents of someone kissing 40: knees in tatters, wrists twisted by tendonitis, loss of cool. Leahy is not out to do a hatchet job, but he won’t pretend to be impressed by the emperor’s new clothes. He will call Jordan for presumptuousness and uncourtly behavior, for dismissiveness and slighting of fellow players, for bad work habits and general ham-fistedness. He will cut the star a little slack for being a child of the bubble, riding high on his earnings and the absurd media grovelings (degrading evidence of journalists’ complicity in making a god out of someone who plays a game), protected to a fare-thee-well. But he will then cut Jordan down to size—a mere six feet, say—for arrogance and “how helpless he seemed to be against the pull of his appetites.” The point is that havoc trails upon sport stardom, and Leahy makes it more than well.
The self-immolating trajectory of a display of hubris worthy of Aristophanes’ contempt, complete with the inevitable fall from grace.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5426-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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