This book about "old men and their war stories" is full of golf lore and will be a pleasure for fans and historians of the...
A sportswriter embarks on a "legends tour" to discover the experiences of both the biggest and the uncelebrated names and contests in golf and capture those veteran players "as they actually are" today.
In leisurely, detailed interviews, Sports Illustrated senior writer Bamberger (The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, 2006, etc.) reveals the characters of the greats of the game and the contexts of their celebrated tournaments and achievements. Though he doesn’t necessarily think things were better “back in the day,” he admires how "in Arnold [Palmer]'s day, the Masters Tournament was charming and clubby and genteel.” (Bamberger admits only in passing that "Augusta National is not a place where change comes quickly”; indeed, the guardians at that storied club, which was founded in 1932 and has hosted the Masters since 1934, didn't allow women as members until 2012, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina financier Darla Moore received membership.) The author clearly appreciates the members of the Greatest Generation and their "old-school, fly-straight, DIY values, golfing and otherwise,” but he also recognizes the need for change. About the camaraderie among golfers in these exclusive, country-club environments, he cleverly writes, “golf is [a] book group for men." Though Bamberger is awestruck by his subjects—see the dozens of pages devoted to Arnold Palmer—and enamored with the game, his prose is thankfully straightforward and free of sanctimony or syrupy, romantic sentiments, and his interviews and game accounts are extensive without being tedious.
This book about "old men and their war stories" is full of golf lore and will be a pleasure for fans and historians of the game, specifically the era between the 1950s and the 1970s.Pub Date: April 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4382-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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