Lakers diehards and hoops historians should give it a shot, but others may pass.
In-depth biography of one of the NBA’s greatest players and executives.
Decades after the conclusion of Jerry West’s career, “Mr. Clutch,” the bumpkin-turned-superstar whose graceful silhouette serves as the NBA logo, is still considered one of the best players ever. Despite his star status, he often shunned the spotlight during his career. As Lazenby (Journalism/Virginia Tech Univ.; The Show: The Inside Story of the Spectacular Los Angeles Lakers in the Words of Those Who Lived It, 2005, etc.) peels back the layers of mystique surrounding his historically reticent subject, West is revealed as a peevish perfectionist whose hypercompetitive nature, which provided such an edge on the court, made him a high-strung, obstinate womanizer off it. The author painstakingly recounts West’s early years growing up in West Virginia, delving into his family history and focusing in particular on his contentious relationship with his father and similarities to his mother, from whom he derived his stoicism and legendary work ethic. After considerable success in high school, West earned All-American status at West Virginia University before being drafted by the Lakers. His professional career was marked by historic personal success (14-time all-star and Hall of Famer) and agonizing team disappointment—though he won one NBA title, West’s Lakers lost in the championship round eight times. A brief stint coaching the Lakers followed, but West ultimately found his post-career niche as a Lakers executive, proving to be an astute judge of talent in constructing multiple championship teams led by the likes of Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant. Lazenby gives short shrift to West’s decades of work as a scout and executive, however, and though the author makes a game effort, it’s impossible to make West as compelling on paper as he was on the court.
Lakers diehards and hoops historians should give it a shot, but others may pass.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-345-51083-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: ESPN Books/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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