Atkinson (Writing/Boston Univ.; Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America, 2010, etc.) takes readers on an exuberant journey into the center of the rugby scrum.
As a 35-year veteran of the sport, the author’s passion translates easily to the page, providing a reflective look at his entrance into what he dubs the “blood fraternity.” Atkinson makes no attempt to hide his zeal for the sport, explaining, “There are the things we do for love, and the things we do for rugby…” Atkinson addresses both, examining his struggle to serve two competing mistresses, writing and rugby. Throughout his graduate studies at the University of Florida, Atkinson began to understand the overlapping traits required for writers and rugby players alike: “grit, aggression, physical courage, loyalty, chivalry, insouciance and comic self-awareness…” While Atkinson attempted to hone these skills, he became distracted—not by his sport, but by its culture. When not on the pitch, the author and teammates forged their bonds in the bars, partaking in the usual rabble-rousing (including bar fights and the occasional run-in with the law). Yet Atkinson’s hijinks came to a halt when he learned of the death of his father, a life-changing event that forced him to confront emotional pain in addition to his physical pain. Though an overseas rugby tour helped him through his grief, it was not the sport that healed him, but the lessons learned from its grueling trials. A testosterone-laden tale deserving of an audience well beyond the locker room.
Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-54769-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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