Don't look to these unauthorized ``confessions'' by three sisters and former Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders for a history or exposÇ of the famed cheerleading corps. It tells almost nothing about the organization but is, instead, a shallow, sticky paean to overweening glamour and materialism. Suzette made the 36-woman squad in 1978, followed a year later by Stephanie (who, despite the triumvirate byline, narrates the ``story''). Both were retired by 1982. Third sister Sheri caught on as an alternate in 1985 but quit before the end of the season. Their mother, who dominates the first half of the book, was in hot pursuit of ``every little girl's dream,'' strictly coordinating her daughters' ``look,'' dating, and behavior: They were never to wear jeans or speak loudly. (``A low-class gutter sow'' is loud; a ``real lady...is as quiet...as a rose.'') Stephanie's most traumatic experience as a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader was, as she tells it, hearing of director Suzanne Mitchell's displeasure with her hairdo: ``I was very confused...I would look in the mirror for hours and cry. I hated myself.'' The payoff for ``the Rockettes of football'' certainly wasn't the $15 per game or even the personal appearances, TV movies, and game shows—for which the girls most often were not paid; it was, instead, a privilege just to wear the blue hot pants and bask in the Texas spotlight, to be treated ``like a geisha'' and end up ``being supported by rich men.'' Gushing descriptions of ``wholesome'' sexuality, coyote fur coats, and snakeskin boots; facile emotional crises and Fantasy Island pink/sunset romances with handsome oilmen; plus a lack of substantive information about the subject—all make for a relentlessly vacuous exercise. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-06334-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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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