Not quite deserving of a spot alongside Plimpton and Angell but a pleasing glimpse into one corner of countercultural...
An anecdotal tour of a sport that has only been around for a few decades but that claims legions of adherents.
To play Ultimate Frisbee, you need a disc and a dog, right? Well, no. The neohippie penchant for throwing a Frisbee at a willing golden retriever has nothing to do with an athletically demanding sport that Gessner (English/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington; All the Wild that Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, 2014, etc.) describes as “a hybrid of hockey, soccer, basketball, and football.” Yet, as he notes, there’s an old-hippie element to the proceedings: the game was invented at a suburban New Jersey high school in that heady year of 1969, it’s definitively coeducational, and somewhere around the pitch there’s likely to be a cloud of marijuana smoke wafting. Gessner’s definition takes scarcely a page, and some of the rest of the book is padded. The “wild youth” part of the subtitle is the least interesting aspect of the narrative (“I see myself for what I was: a scared little boy playing at life”), while the origin story, as with all origin stories, is foundational in more ways than one and is the best part of the yarn—and how could it not be, with a geek Hercules who stood 6 feet 7 inches tall and managed to go to high school “without getting kicked out once”? Parts of the narrative are overwritten, parts undercooked. Readers will want to know more circumstantial detail about how the game was transmitted beyond the East Coast and where it might be going as it becomes better known. Still, Gessner’s enthusiasm is unmistakable, and there’s much to commend the story as a case in point of how a kid, once finding his or her métier, can make of a pastime a life-transforming experience.
Not quite deserving of a spot alongside Plimpton and Angell but a pleasing glimpse into one corner of countercultural jockdom.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1056-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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