Greenberg’s morning show will never sound the same when fans consider that he has already fielded his wife’s sleepy plaints,...
A pleasing slice of radio sportscaster Greenberg’s life, giving an inkling of how he squares his family priorities with the absurd demands of his job.
When his psychiatrist reassured him that he was not too self-centered to be a father and would surely put his children before his job as host of a popular morning sports-radio show, Greenberg demurred: “Sometimes you don’t put the really important things first. I should know; I talk about sports for a living.” Yet Greenberg, who inherited his obsession with sports from his parents (“I love that [my mother] would have left my father for Joe Namath in a heartbeat, and that he would have applauded her for it,” he reveals) writes with sweet musicality about the wonderful, trying presences of his son and daughter, joking about their urgencies as if he were a high-school prankster. His worldview combines the tenderness of a dad with a sporting man’s vision of harmony; he finds it hard to understand why the world’s war-makers haven’t figured out that at the end of the day combatants should be able to get up, dust off, grab a shower and share a beer. Simplistic? Of course, but it’s still refreshing. “You forgive,” he writes. “It’s what separates us from the animals.” The everyday nonsense of his extended family brings clarity to the exquisite play on the field. Thrill to it while you can, for life is short—except on those nights when a child cries on and on.
Greenberg’s morning show will never sound the same when fans consider that he has already fielded his wife’s sleepy plaints, his aunt’s queries about gambling and his children’s appeal for a warm caress, all before they tuned in to the station.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6438-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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