An urban-ghetto saga of youthful despair and self-destruction transformed into a striving for excellence, told by a sportswriter and a dedicated Little League coach. Give Coach Dixon points for honesty. He was a talented young athlete but he was also, he tells us, a smug, grandstanding punk with a taste for wine, women, and gambling. He wasted, he says, every athletic and academic opportunity that came his way. After dropping out of college, he landed a job by using his computer skills to forge a college transcript. His life began to turn around when the company found out about his deception but elected to keep him on. He blossomed in the corporate world, finding a self-confidence he had not known outside of the playing field. Several years later, Dixon drove through his old Pittsburgh ghetto neighborhood and was angered by the lack of respect and discipline he saw on the local baseball field. While watching, he was recruited to umpire a ragged Little League game and swiftly got drawn into coaching. He also got hooked on a single mother with a troubled fifth-grader named Lance. Lance displayed all the surliness and defensive indifference toward school that young Dixon did, and Coach Tru became obsessed with making Lance and his Little League teammates into self-respecting, determined young men. To the book's credit, all the many pitfalls, reversals, and failures in this improbable crusade are recorded. The players slowly respond to their strict but caring coach, turning into winners. Dixon's team gets their name, The Next Level, from the response he demands when he yells ``How far do you wanna go?'' to his troops. With plenty of emotion, humor, and good baseball description, we follow the team's climb to the championship level. An inspiring, heart-warming Bad News Bears for the inner city. (12 b&w photos, not seen) (TV and radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-88282-155-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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