An exploration of the hypercompetitive world of youth hockey.
Cohen’s latest, a mashup of memoir, The Mighty Ducks, and The Bad News Bears, is as much about the irrational, overbearing behavior of parents as it is about the kids who play the sport. If the author’s heartfelt, often brutally funny depiction of peewee hockey is accurate, then soccer moms and baseball dads have nothing on the frighteningly obsessive mania of hockey parents. Cohen ushers readers into a hockey-obsessed corner of the country, Fairfield County, Connecticut, where his adolescent son plays on a peewee team consisting of a mix of boys and girls ages 11 and 12. The author shows us a youth league system so ruthlessly competitive that it divides the players into a hockey hierarchy that consists of four different skill levels: AA, A1, A, B. Of course, with each level comes a corresponding social status for both parent and child. “If a kid who’s been on single A slips to B,” writes Cohen, “he will be ostracized, his parents cast out. If you talk to them, it’s the way you talk to a formerly rich man who has lost everything.” We follow Cohen through the ups and (mostly) downs of one season as experienced from the unique perspective of a dedicated hockey dad: the constant travel, the sociopathic hockey parents, and, for his son’s Ridgefield Bears, many losses. Though the author, who clearly loves the sport, revels in his comic observations of his son’s experiences on the ice, there is a note of serious lament about the overall state of the game as it's played now. For Cohen, hockey in America has become something of a lost cause, mainly because self-interested adults remake the sport “in the image of the grown-up world.”
An alternately charming and acerbic portrait of another youth sport spoiled by adults.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
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Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
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More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SELF-HELP
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