Though NASCAR hardly needs any more fans, Rich's enthusiastic voice will likely draw an additional crowd of the curious to...
An exuberant introduction to stock-car racing, from muffler bearings to personalities to track mystique, by former racing reporter and publicist Rich (What Southern Women Know, not reviewed).
This overview of the NASCAR scene is underpinned by a wealth of personal stories, thanks to the fact that Rich has been a fixture at the tracks for nearly 20 years. She began as a reporter covering the old short tracks and witnessed the transition to the big motor speedways. She has lived to see a sport once treated with regal condescension rise to unrivaled popularity, and she has known the men (and the few women) who got it there. Rich traces the roots of stock-car racing back to the Deep South moonshiners outrunning the law with their contraband and then challenging each other as to who was the fastest. She is able to convey to readers the brains and strategy involved in this sport; winners, she reminds us, are rarely the guys with the biggest engines. Rich cut her teeth writing about Bill Elliott's exploits, and she grew immeasurably in her understanding at the feet of Alan Kulwicki. She excels at bringing to life the big players: Richard Petty, Bobby and Davey Allison, Dale Earnhardt, Tim Richmond, and other superstars. Rich has plenty of storytelling verve and insider's knowledge; she keeps her anecdotes short and sweet—or sad, for there is plenty to be sad about in speed-driven NASCAR. She stumbles only when doubling as an advice columnist, dishing out tired clichés like “it takes only one success to wipe out a thousand failures” and “always remember that somebody's money somewhere makes your livelihood possible.” Even these, it should be noted, are of a piece with the direct, personal tone of her prose throughout.
Though NASCAR hardly needs any more fans, Rich's enthusiastic voice will likely draw an additional crowd of the curious to the track.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-000589-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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