by Verne Lundquist ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2018
A textbook for would-be sports commentators and a pleasure for fans.
If there’s a sport to be played, as this amiable memoir recounts, then Lundquist will be there to call it.
Recently retired after a long career, the author is known for his contributions to many areas of sportscasting, and so he has been for decades—or, as he puts it with characteristic enthusiasm, “for more than fifty years I’ve had a front-row seat to some of the greatest sporting events America has witnessed.” True, and if he’s done commentary on some of the dogs, too, he’s done it with good humor, a colorful way with words, and a gelatinously shimmering belly laugh. But yet there are the big games, too, such as the 1979 match between the Dallas Cowboys and their archenemies, the Washington Redskins. Begins Lundquist, setting the scene for his pageslong analysis, “a great comeback is a beauty to behold, but it doesn’t climb to the top of my charts if the results aren’t of any real consequence.” With matching records at season’s end and an undying enmity, the two teams put on quite a show—and, writes the author, played their hearts out. Writing with the benefit of hindsight, Lundquist takes a moment to worry that Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach may have been an early sufferer of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in a time when “tape an aspirin to your forehead was the league’s concussion protocol.” Every sport known to humankind, it seems, comes into consideration, for Lundquist is nothing if not versatile; it will surprise many of his viewers to know that he counts among the highest points of his professional career “my unlikely love affair with figure skating.” That love affair began once his network lost a pro football contract, but even so, he writes, give him the choice between calling a Super Bowl and announcing the Winter Olympics with Scott Hamilton, and it’ll be the latter every time out.
A textbook for would-be sports commentators and a pleasure for fans.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268444-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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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