An inspiring, eye-opening introduction to a sport not to be confused with commercial wrestling.
An absorbing account of achievement by a one-legged college athlete who beat the odds and won the 2010-2011 NCAA individual wrestling championship.
In 2012, Robles, who is now an inspirational speaker, was awarded the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance and was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. The author attributes much of his success to the encouragement he received from his mother, who was 16 and unmarried when he was born with one leg. “There is nothing wrong with you,” she told him constantly, a sentiment that has stuck with him. With assistance from Murphy (co-author: The Happiness of Pursuit: A Father's Courage, a Son's Love and Life's Steepest Climb, 2011, etc.), Robles describes his determination in the face of defeat, beginning in elementary school when he stood up to bullies. He played flag football but gravitated to wrestling where he could use his overall body strength more effectively. In middle school, he joined the wrestling team, and a supportive coach helped him develop an individual wrestling style (dropping “down low on the mat” where, he explains, he “was much more dangerous”). Despite his disability, with the help of crutches, he was able to keep up with the rigorously brutal training regimen that was required. Wrestling is a vigorous sport, requiring the exertion of almost every muscle in the body, and it demands mental as well as physical discipline in order to successfully counter an opponent's moves. Robles also describes his experiences with the politics of college athletics.
An inspiring, eye-opening introduction to a sport not to be confused with commercial wrestling.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40777-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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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