TV contributor, biographer, veteran sportswriter and young adult novelist Lipsyte (Center Field, 2010, etc.) revisits key events in his life, the sporting world, the lives of professional athletes and the evolving cultural significance of sports in America.
The author begins with an account of how he stumbled into journalism, landing a copyboy job with the New York Times not long after graduating from Columbia University. He had a skeptical eye practically from the beginning. As a chubby schoolboy, he had endured harassment from jocks. “I was,” he writes, “a fat kid trapped at the bottom of the masculinity chart.” His remarks about the Times, scattered throughout, range from grateful to caustic (he has only ill to say of Howell Raines). But he acknowledges some mentors, too, principally Gay Talese and Howard Cosell. He charts the vicissitudes of his relationships with some athletic legends, among them Muhammad Ali, Mickey Mantle (he praises Jane Leavy’s 2010 The Last Boy), Joe DiMaggio and Billy Jean King. However, Lipsyte doesn’t focus entirely on athletic celebrities. He provides sections on lacrosse players on the New York Onondaga Indian reservation and on Gerard Papa (a youth-basketball pioneer), and he talks about two huge stories he started, then abandoned for various reasons: the drug investigations that became the story behind The French Connection and the life of David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam” murderer). The author also tells about his experiences with NASCAR and cycling, and he writes sensitively about women in sports and about the emergence of openly gay athletes. He reserves his harshest criticism for his sports-writing colleagues, many of whom he views as little more than dim cheerleaders. Though frank about his struggles with cancer, Lipsyte bobs and weaves about other aspects of his personal life (three marriages ended for reasons unrevealed) and ends with a moving tribute to his late father. At times a bit detached for a memoir, but packed with bright, biting insights about America’s obsessions with athletics.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-176913-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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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