The master of emotional jousting on the court speaks candidly of life challenges off of it—a must-read for basketball...
The NCAA’s winningest basketball coach opens up about private and public contests that have defined her.
While the title of Summitt’s latest work (Reach for the Summit, 1998, etc.) is a reflection of her long career as head coach of the University of Tennessee’s Lady Vols—eight national championships and 1,098 victories—the substance of this engaging memoir offers an unvarnished look at defining moments behind those incomparable achievements. In 2011, the basketball world was shocked when Summitt, one of the best strategic minds ever to grace the hardwood, revealed she had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. The author tackles the elephant in the room by introducing each historically gauged chapter with snapshots of conversations, between Summitt and co-author Jenkins (co-author: In a Heartbeat: Sharing the Power of Cheerful Giving, 2010, etc.), focused squarely on the coach’s relation to her illness. Though hardly one to wallow, when asked if she would trade her championships to have her health restored, Summitt admits, “I would give back every one of my trophies to still be coaching.” The bulk of the memoir demonstrates why, with detailed recollections plumbing the depths of Summitt’s investment in psychological tactics used to help players reach their potential and strategies executed in key games. The author is also quick to show her human side, exploring the drive her rural upbringing and tough-love father instilled in her, the pride she feels over having raised a son, her regret over the breakup of her marriage, her struggles with rheumatoid arthritis and her sense of accomplishment over the 100 percent graduation rate of her players. Frank on sensitive subjects like the inequities women athletes have had to face, Summitt also includes many humorous and touching anecdotes involving some of the biggest names in the women’s game.
The master of emotional jousting on the court speaks candidly of life challenges off of it—a must-read for basketball junkies, sport fans and any whose lives have been touched by incurable illness.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-385-34687-0
Page Count: 407
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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