With his signature irreverence, tempered just a bit by age, McEnroe serves up a juicy, revealing look at how his tennis...
The tennis legend reflects on later stages of his personal life and career.
In a follow-up to his bestselling first memoir, You Cannot Be Serious (2002), McEnroe offers fans more glimpses into the storied career of an unassuming kid from Queens with “quick hands, good movement,” and a “smart tennis brain.” Now pushing 60 and over a decade out from his last major tour event, one of the greatest lefties ever to dominate both singles and doubles play presents an assortment of vignettes recalling pivotal moments on the court. He also reflects on the trappings accompanying that world-renown mastery, particularly as he attempts to redeem his thorny image as the anti-establishment “Jesus of Anger”—a pithy characterization offered by wife Patty Smyth, who weighs in on her husband’s character and episodes in their life. If one subject centers McEnroe’s account, it is the plight of the aging professional athlete “learning to cope with the impact the advancing years have on you,” made all the more challenging because pros “do it in public.” In addition to reckoning with physical changes—and as much as he likes to “moan about how badly selfies suck”—the author admits that, for him, “competing, performing and getting applause for what I do will probably always be the ultimate drug.” He paints his disparate forays into art collecting, sports commentating, coaching, game show hosting, guitar playing, being a bit actor, and now father of six all as attempts to fill that void. Tennis fans looking for more insight into the game will not be disappointed, as McEnroe rails against the sport’s elitism, the distraction of “grunting,” strategic bathroom breaks (“totally out of hand”), and the “annoying habit” of doubles partners opting to high-five “after missing a shot or double faulting.”
With his signature irreverence, tempered just a bit by age, McEnroe serves up a juicy, revealing look at how his tennis afterlife is playing out off the court.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-32489-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2017
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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