Rushin provides convincing evidence that life in the ’70s wasn’t as chaotic as it’s often made out to be.
An award-winning sportswriter looks back, mostly fondly, at a childhood in the 1970s in a Minnesota suburb.
As the anxious middle child in a Catholic family with four boys and one girl, overseen by a housewife mother and a father who traveled around the world selling eight-track tape for 3M, Sports Illustrated writer Rushin (The 34-Ton Bat: The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects, 2013, etc.) may not have been able to compete with his athletic older brothers for glory on the playing field, but he pleased his parents with a talent for puns and other wordplay and himself with a collection of baseball cards. For a future sportswriter, he had the good fortune to grow up in Bloomington when the city was home to all the major Minnesota sports teams: the Vikings, the Twins, and the North Stars. While Rushin still appears to bear a bit of resentment toward his oldest brother, the administrator of the “Indian Burn” and the “Dutch Rub,” he clearly respects and admires his lovingly involved father and particularly his mother, with her concern that her children should avoid the awful fate of being perceived as “hillbillies.” The author devotes much of the narrative to the pop culture of the 1970s: the titular bicycle, the candy cigarettes the boys brandished, the near worship of Farrah Fawcett, and the fear-inspiring experiences of seeing The Poseidon Adventure and Jaws on the big screen. Although frequent sidetracks into generic comments on life in middle America (the absence of seat belt use and the frequency of smoking) and asides about the history of Midwest-created objects such as the Nerf ball and the Weber grill sometimes detract from the author’s personal story, the nostalgic sweetness of his memories carries the book along comfortably.
Rushin provides convincing evidence that life in the ’70s wasn’t as chaotic as it’s often made out to be.Pub Date: July 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39223-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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