It may be good to be Gronk; it’s not so great to read Gronk.
A prince of football tells all about growing up Gronk.
From his days as a young Gronkling through the victory in Super Bowl XLIX, New England Patriots tight end Gronkowski—with the assistance of sports agent Rosenhaus (co-author, with Terrell Owens: T.O., 2011, etc.)—apostrophizes the physical life. We are introduced to his family: four rowdy brothers, a rowdy father, and a seldom-mentioned mom. Simple sentences in a simple chronology (“That first game to start the 2007 season was against Brigham Young University, on the road…I had to go 100 percent on every single play…”) detail high school, college, and pro games, mostly victories, and the parts Gronkowski played in each. The prose does not grow with the boy, and apparently the boy doesn’t grow very much either. For example, the very young Gronkowski says of his brothers, “It was so much fun to me to tackle them when they weren’t looking,” and a more adult Gronk reports that “for no reason other than to get wild, I kicked my brother Gord in the groin and then body-slammed him.” Similarly, the descriptions of the offseason and postgame partying are interchangeable. Games are won; Gronk parties. Games are lost; Gronk parties. Injuries (serious ones) are sustained; Gronk parties. A genuine superstar and legendary free spirit, Gronkowski epitomizes one stereotype of an athlete: he trains hard, plays hard, and parties hard. Nothing else matters, and little else seems to occupy his attention. Anyone hoping to detect a sly grin or ironic wink will be disappointed. Size, strength, speed, intensity, and revelry are the only concerns in this realm of sometimes-vulgar physicality. One impressive note, however, is the author’s claim that he hasn’t spent “one dime of my signing bonus or NFL contract money.” Other pro athletes could at least learn from that.
It may be good to be Gronk; it’s not so great to read Gronk.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5480-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Jeter Publishing/Gallery Books
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2015
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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