Sure to send readers in search of the highlight reel.
The bittersweet tale of Pistol Pete, one of basketball’s most talented and tragic legends.
Pete Maravich, born in 1947, was groomed from birth to be the best basketball player of all time. His father, Press, was his coach and taskmaster; the pair functioned as extensions of each other. Kriegel (Namath, 2004) begins by expounding at length on Press’s hardscrabble youth, when basketball became his salvation and his life. Press imbued his son with every ounce of his ambition. It didn’t take long for Pete, fanatical about perfecting every drill he was taught, to display an almost preternatural affinity for basketball. Pistol Pete integrated flawless fundamentals with showy moves. As his legend grew and he became the “great white hope” of the NBA, the weight of expectations crushed his free spirit, which was further battered by his mother’s 1974 suicide. His thin frame began to break down, and old-school coaches who didn’t appreciate Pete’s talent lessened his competitive fire. He sought comfort in everything from alcohol to belief in extraterrestrials. Despite spurts of brilliance and a reputation as one of the most talented players of all time, he walked away from the NBA in 1980, after ten seasons, with no championship ring. He would find happiness in Jesus and his family until a heart attack during a pickup match ended his life at the age of 40. Kriegel occasionally lingers too long on Press, but his son emerges in this compelling, nuanced account as a man both talented and complex.
Sure to send readers in search of the highlight reel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-8497-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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