A work of cumulative, powerful impact: This author doesn’t allow anyone, readers included, to evade life’s tough questions.
Boxing commentator and former trainer Atlas describes a youth spent looking for love and recognition in all the wrong places, until he found it inside the ropes.
In his heyday, the author was known in boxing circles as a trainer’s trainer who gave his charges the hand skills and, more importantly, the head skills they needed to be champions. He came by those skills the hard way. As a boy, starved for his parents’ attention, Atlas took the low road: dropping out of high school, street-fighting, taking to petty crime. He did a short stint in prison. Then he caught a break. Released from jail, awaiting trial, he got a job working at Cus D’Amato’s legendary Catskills training camp. Prison had taught Atlas about fear; everyone feels it, and it can be harnessed as a positive asset, he writes. Boxing camp taught him about discipline. Not that he didn’t occasionally slip back into his bad behavior, which provides much color here—after all, this is a book about confronting your weaknesses. In a voice shorn of pretense, both edgy and polished, Atlas describes trying to instill his brand of integrity in his fighters, a bunch of young men who had their share of emotional problems. He had to teach them to honor themselves, in particular not to cave during rough moments in or out of the ring. If they did, he told them, they would hurt more the next day than they ever would from immediately confronting the problem at hand. This demanding ethos cost Atlas more than one fighter and some significant paydays, but he also won world championships and a sterling reputation. He may soon be even better known as a talented boxing anecdotist.
A work of cumulative, powerful impact: This author doesn’t allow anyone, readers included, to evade life’s tough questions.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-054240-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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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