Occasionally clichéd, occasionally maudlin, but, overall, candid, thoughtful, and compelling.
The mother of renowned cyclist Lance Armstrong tells her own story, looking back on years filled with childhood poverty, teenage pregnancy, a disapproving mother, an alcoholic father, workplace hurdles, abusive husbands—and lots of love flowing to and from her son.
Fifty-year-old Kelly (the name she took from her current husband, number four) grew up in Dallas housing projects without amenities. She performed well in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, however, until becoming involved with one of the fast guys. Pregnant at 16, giving birth to Lance at 17, Kelly convinced the biological father to marry her. But he was frequently irresponsible and restless, eventually leaving his wife and son. Without any college education, Kelly struggled to find secretarial jobs that would pay the bills, and, after years of proving herself in the workplace, she became a telecommunications company executive with vast responsibilities. Proving herself in the world of marriage turned out to be harder. Husband number two was an abusive philanderer. Number three was considerate but lost job after job because of alcoholism. Only after Lance Armstrong achieved fame and wealth as a world-class athlete did Kelly find the quality husband she had been seeking for decades. Working with professional writer and cancer survivor Rodgers (Bald in the Land of Big Hair, 2001), Kelly touches hearts and minds in chapter after chapter. This is especially true when she recounts how she helped Lance beat life-threatening testicular cancer diagnosed when he was 25. Then she cheered him through his recovery until he won the Tour de France for a record sixth time. Some of the story has been told by Armstrong in It’s Not About the Bike. But most of the material is fresh. Toward book’s end, the saga moves to a new generation, now that Kelly is grandmother to Lance’s children.
Occasionally clichéd, occasionally maudlin, but, overall, candid, thoughtful, and compelling.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-1855-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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