With the help of sportswriter Ryan (Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, 1995), the three-time National Coach of the Year and coach of the gold-medal-winning 1996 Olympic women's basketball team tells all. Perhaps as well known for her sober behavior and dress as for her coaching success, VanDerveer displays a side here—warm, determined, unabashedly flawed, and unselfconsciously upbeat—that should surprise those who have not followed her career since the beginning. VanDerveer relives the inequities that defined her playing career in the days prior to and just following the inception of Title IX; the grudging acceptance of the letter, rather than the spirit, of that law; and the none-too-subtle gender discrimination that still taints most sports. (After arriving in Atlanta for the Olympics, members of VanDerveer's team were told that they would receive just half the meal money of their male counterparts). Rather than catalog these setbacks and inequities, VanDerveer instead explains how her own doggedness and will to succeed helped her rise. The coach repeatedly (if unintentionally) demonstrates how her seldom-heralded ability to adapt enabled her to continually challenge and inspire Team USA—which compiled a 60-0 record en route to the gold medal. Since the games, VanDerveer has returned to Stanford, turning aside lucrative offers to coach in one of the two competing pro women's leagues. (During the off- season, she does television commentary on the WNBA.) However, judging from the impact she's had on her players' lives, VanDerveer has succeeded in making women stop listening to reasons why they can't or shouldn't play and start thinking about how they can be better players. (8 pages photos, not seen) (First printing of 60,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-380-97588-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
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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