Soccer has taken its place in the American sporting constellation in no small part due to fans and writers like Agovino.
One man’s experience of American soccer’s years of bust and boom.
As a teenager, Agovino (The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City, 2008) fell in love with the beautiful game. Born and bred in the Bronx, where the typical American team sports of baseball, football, basketball and hockey reigned, the author nonetheless found himself captivated by a game that most Americans disdained when they acknowledged it at all. By 1982, when Agovino attended his first real soccer match, an all-star game at Giants Stadium featuring some of the world’s elite players, the luster of the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos was fading and the United States men’s national team had not made the World Cup since 1950 (and would not do so until 1990). Agovino played for his high school team, went on to New York University, where he covered the varsity team for the school paper, and upon graduation, found a series of jobs in journalism and as a freelance writer covering soccer as much as he was able. Agovino’s passion rings clear throughout this well-written book, but it is difficult to discern his intended audience. His personal journey through the sport is idiosyncratic, and the book is neither a history nor a traditional memoir—though it is closer to the latter than the former. Newcomers to the sport may find themselves a bit lost, and while the author purports to hate a common breed of exclusive and elitist American soccer fans, he betrays his own version of off-putting elitism and condescension. Nonetheless, those readers who buy in will see the growth of soccer in the United States in a deeply felt, personal journey.
Soccer has taken its place in the American sporting constellation in no small part due to fans and writers like Agovino.Pub Date: June 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4047-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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