With spellbinding results, a writer better known for his immortal baseball books crosses over—both to another sport, boxing, and to another literary genre, the sprawling social history. Born in 1895 and reared amid the hardscrabble surroundings of Colorado mining towns, William Harrison Dempsey entered adulthood as America girded for entry in the Great War. Exploding onto the boxing scene after felling the giant champion Jess Willard, Dempsey found himself at the center of a storm. Withstanding accusations of brutality from a spurned wife and charges of draft dodging in the war, Dempsey throughout the 1920s proved himself a good man and no dope, to boot. He was courted by kings, Hollywood moguls, and a parade of beautiful women. Meanwhile, in the ring, he faced legendary opponents in fights that even today are recognized simply by the names of the combatants: Dempsey v. Firpo, Dempsey v. Tunney. As the title suggests, this book is about boxing as both a “sweet science” and a corrupt spectacle. More than this, however, Kahn plumbs the times, and what times they were: the Great War, baseball’s 1919 “Black Sox” affair, the Roaring “20s. And Jack Dempsey was the cynosure of these times—a man praised at his passing at age 87 by the writer Jim Murray, with the following words: “he took an era with him.” Kahn chronicles the people and events that propel the narrative, among them, presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the Scopes trial, Knute Rockne, Babe Ruth, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Lindbergh, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Al Capone. He also gives an exacting and gripping portrait of sport in its golden era. Kahn pays tribute to a generation of sportswriters—Lardner, Gallico, Pegler, Runyon, Broun, et al.—who shared equally the credit for making the times seem so grand. An intoxicating panoply of legends and heroes, surely one of the most solid and delightful sporting histories of recent times. (16 pages b&w photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100296-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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