Well-intended but best read by 60-something fans of Boston ball.
Hit the quarterback. Hit the mook. This tale of crime and penalty focuses on a local antihero who did plenty of both.
Kelly, a member of the conference-winning Saint Don Bosco Technical High School team of 1974, tells two stories. The first is a fairly ordinary football memoir: the team owes it all to God and coach, and it’s made up of stock types such as “the guy who always talked the talk because he knew he could back up every word” and the boy who, “easy to talk to…is quiet, intelligent, and dependable.” In this case, the coach, Jack Clyde Dempsey, was an upstanding fellow who had an unusually sophisticated way of reading the field and the stances of the opposing players: “The offensive lineman knows when the ball is being hiked,” he says. “You don’t. Picking up on these clues helps you to neutralize his advantage.” Pop Warner or pro, a player can learn a thing or two from Kelly’s pages when Dempsey talks. There are fine turns in this aspect of the book, as Kelly reveals the scarifying effect of his mother’s suicide and the grit required of a kid growing up motherless and Catholic on the edge of a very bad neighborhood. Less successful is the second story, built on the revelation, mired in mounds of cliché, that Dempsey later moved on to being a hit man for hire, eventually a fugitive and a fixture on the FBI wanted list. There’s not much drama in what ought to be a tense, frightening situation, and the best words here again belong to the now coked-up yet eminently reasonable Dempsey and not the author: “If I hurt someone right away, then we’ll never get our money,” he explains. “But if I’m coming to visit someone three, four times, and they haven’t made a payment, well…things might get a little rough.”
Well-intended but best read by 60-something fans of Boston ball.Pub Date: July 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61088-169-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bancroft Press
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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