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
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
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