Fans of Olympic hockey will delight in Eruzione’s spirited memoir.
The captain of the 1980 “miracle on ice” turns in his account of that victory.
In a moment that’s lodged in the memories of millions, Eruzione recounts how a team of American amateur hockey players, a couple of them still teenagers, faced off against a veteran Russian squad made up of professionals. It was a long shot, reckoned the author, who captained the American Olympic team at Lake Placid, and scarcely believable when the scoreboard turned 4-3 in favor of his team. Forging them into a unit was the work of coach Herb Brooks, who had a curious method: “he made us a close-knit team by making himself everybody’s enemy.” When his team won, he went off alone, not joining in the celebration. It was strange behavior, but it worked, and, as Eruzione allows, nobody was better than Brooks at getting inside a player’s head and pushing the right buttons to achieve the desired results. Some of the book, charming but hardly indispensable, concerns the author’s childhood in a poor but aspirational Italian American family in Boston, where “my mother had a pot with sausage and gravy on the stove every day.” Students of athletic development will be interested in his observation that he came to excel in hockey because he played two other sports, baseball and football, that taught him transferrable skills. But the best part of the narrative is the you-are-there, blow-by-blow account of that Lake Placid game of 1980, told with verve and a sharp eye for the right detail, which served him well in a later career as a sports commentator: “Mark picked up the puck and hit Robby McClanahan on the left wing. His shot went wide. Back the Soviets came to our side. Alexander Golikov tried a backhander. Jimmy sticked it aside. The puck got tied up along the boards. Another whistle. And an incident.”
Fans of Olympic hockey will delight in Eruzione’s spirited memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296095-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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