A fine introduction to the racetrack that’s also a dazzlingly successful blind date, deeply and unexpectedly satisfying,...
A wonderfully expressive love story between Mooney, who writes for The Blood-Horse magazine, and that permanent adolescent of the horse world, the thoroughbred.
Mooney made the acquaintance of the racetrack through the inspired guidance of her grandmother, May-May, who knew everything there was to know about the track, having spent hours as a youth draped over the fence at Pimlico watching the horses and cut her teeth at the trotting tracks in Maryland. She gave the bug wholesale to her granddaughter, but when May-May died, so did Mooney’s attachment to the sport. In a graceful, forward style, Mooney traces her return to the racetrack to a broadcast of the Kentucky Derby she happened on while shopping at Radio Shack. Immersing herself in that world once again, she brings it, with great respect, to the reader. The elusive romance of the trainer’s life is typified by the trailblazing John Nerud and the intuitive, freewheeling Bob Baffert. Mooney charts the careers of two peerless riders, Angel Cordero Jr. and Donna Barton; salutes hotwalkers and grooms like Cleevie, who knows how to make a horse shine in bloom; and nods at the gamblers and the handicappers. She makes it clear she’s on the side of the risk-takers, for “to urge a horse to come into second or third seemed to run counter to our entire relationship.” There is the dreadful downside of drugged horses, drugged jockeys, and fixed races, but there is also the sheer glory of the animals, the “playful, moody, skittish, and temperamental, easily distracted and even more easily bored” thoroughbreds, which also happen to be sensitive, elegant, and impossible to tame.
A fine introduction to the racetrack that’s also a dazzlingly successful blind date, deeply and unexpectedly satisfying, between readers and thoroughbreds. (b&w photos throughout)Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019853-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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
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.
