The fascinating story of a once-invincible man “who has made the best of the cards that life has dealt him but…revealed...
An engaging biography of the Olympic sprinter and convicted killer we thought we knew.
Carlin (Knowing Mandela: A Personal Portrait, 2013, etc.) reveals the likely impulses of Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-leg amputee and international symbol of courage and determination who shot and killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, on Feb. 14, 2013. The peculiar circumstances of the shooting and the globally televised trial riveted the world. The author has sufficient access to provide seemingly direct narration from the crime scene. He describes Pistorius as "almost fainting from the rotting metal stench of her wounds, battling to get a purchase on her soaked, slippery frame….” He was "howling in despair" and "beseeching God to let her live.” Carlin recounts Pistorius' triumphant racing career and persona as a brave and invulnerable athlete ("half-man, half-machine") and reveals the self-delusion necessary to mask his desire to be seen as normal (the author explains how Pistorius, who is white, was adored by all races in post-apartheid South Africa. The first disabled runner to compete in the Olympic Games, his success embodied “what all races like to see as the indomitable national spirit.” However, following that tragic night in February 2013, Pistorius' image immediately changed from "the greatest national hero for South Africans of all races since Mandela" to a calculating criminal charged with premeditated murder. Overall, Carlin's reporting is detailed and quick-moving, aside from some overly detailed sections that some readers may skim—e.g., the crafting of Pistorius’ metal and silicone running blades in Iceland; encounters with his loyal, fervent devotees ("Pistorians"). The author offers complete and absorbing coverage of this bizarre story, removing the mask from a previously one-dimensional role model.
The fascinating story of a once-invincible man “who has made the best of the cards that life has dealt him but…revealed himself to possess to an equally extreme degree the insecurities that all are prey to.”Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229706-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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