by Tom Callahan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2003
Whatever Callahan is driving at here, it remains a mystery.
Golf Digest columnist Callahan takes an unfocused dip into the world of professional golf, intending to use Tiger Woods as his lodestone.
His narrative, however, is too unbridled to have a central character. Nothing original will be gleaned from these pages as pertains to Woods, who continues to be a pleasant and graceful cipher. Callahan’s report that Tiger is a naturally gifted golfer who works hard at his game to achieve a thrilling level of control over the ball is not late-breaking news. Woods’s coach, Butch Harmon, may say, “Golf’s a fickle game . . . even the great ones find it, lose it, find it again, lose it again,” but Woods has pretty much found and held his game. Callahan tries to get some mileage out of the father-son theme that has developed of late among golfers—Tiger and his dad, the Duvals, the Harmons, the Nicklauses, the not-so-recent Morrises, even Michael and James Jordan make it into the picture—but this doesn’t really lead anywhere other than some mildly interesting human-interest material. Mostly noticeable here are the qualities Woods doesn’t have. He lacks a sense of humor, at least in public; while Jasper Parnevik has the wit to say that golf is “a very strange game to have as a job,” Woods bristles that “second sucks, and third is worse.” He’ll never make it into golf’s long line of endearing eccentrics like John Daly (of whom Callahan remarks, “Though John thought [his fiancée] was twenty-nine and single, she was actually thirty-nine and married. This represented a pretty good capsule of his grasp on things”). And in dealing with Augusta National’s moronic traditions, Wood could use some of the ethical mettle Lee Trevino displayed in the 1970s. Highlighting the golfer’s faults is clearly unintentional, since Callahan is obviously a fan, but it’s typical of the author’s failure to control his material.
Whatever Callahan is driving at here, it remains a mystery.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-60943-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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