Still, this compensates for its frail artistry with hustle, intelligence, and passion for the game.
The author of overlong novels (Beach Music, 1995, etc.) returns with an overlong memoir of his last season (1966–67) as an overachieving point guard for the Citadel’s mediocre basketball team (8–17).
Conroy can be entertaining and endearingly self-effacing. In this autobiography of a roundballer, he reminds us from the first sentence to the last that he was among the least talented players on his or any other team. Still, he was all-state in high school and won the Citadel’s MVP award with his (self-described) hustle, intelligence, and passion for the game. Here he gives us dribble-by-dribble accounts of some significant basketball moments from elementary school through his final college game, and he interviews his former coach and teammates, several of whom came to see him when he was on tour promoting Beach Music. Some of their stories are affecting, none more so than that of Al Kroboth, a POW during the Vietnam War. Looming large are coach Mel Thompson, whose bullying tactics, Conroy alleges, ruined the careers of some of the players, and—no surprise—the author’s late father, a softened version of whom was the Marine meanie in The Great Santini. Don Conroy appears here as the quintessential crude abuser who slugs and slaps his son in the face, demeans his talents, calls him a “pussy,” but somehow experiences an epiphany after reading Santini and becomes a Nice Guy (“the great miracle of my adult life,” avows his son) whose bruised children grieve at his passing. Conroy is not an especially gifted writer, nor always even a careful one. He tells us that his college English professor taught him to avoid dangling participles and verb-subject agreement errors, but he makes both mistakes here and for good measure throws in a pronoun-case error and a lockerful of sports clichés, mixed metaphors, and sexist language (all women are “pretty” or not).
Still, this compensates for its frail artistry with hustle, intelligence, and passion for the game.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-48912-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
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