The life and achievements of legendary college football coach Knute Rockne are retold in a humdrum biography. From 1918 to 1931, with an overall winning percentage of .881 (105 victories, 12 defeats, and 5 ties), Rockne helped revolutionize the way college football is played and created a devoutly loyal following for Notre Dame. Here magazine editor and sportswriter Robinson (Matty: An American Hero, 1993) rehashes familiar information. While he does discuss some of Rockne’s pioneering moves, particularly the forward pass (a tactic Rockne and Gus Dorais used as players against a heavily favored Army team), most innovations, such as spring football practice and daily conditioning drills which included dance, are glossed over, and the games themselves are recounted in a dull and unimaginative way. The mythical Notre Dame figures of George Gipp (“Win one for the Gipper”) and the Four Horsemen backfield are discussed, of course, and Robinson does try to give a clue to Rockne’s time with background information about the history of Notre Dame, the anti-Catholic bigotry that was long prevalent in the US, the birth of famous sports rivalries such as Notre Dame and Army, and the phenomenon of sports celebrity. But while Rockne the coach, whose untimely death in 1931 caused nationwide grief, is examined, one wishes for more insight into Rockne the erudite man with a pugilist face. Rockne was a master at pumping up his team with speeches and psychological manipulations, but there are not enough direct quotes or meaty anecdotes to give proof of the coach’s oratorical skills and magnetic personality. A basic overview for die-hard followers of Notre Dame football, but the Rockne spirit is lacking. (24 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-510549-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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