A compelling portrait of a dynamic and influential man, on and off the court.
Biographer Schumacher (Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 2005, etc.) turns his eye to a basketball legend.
Renowned as the Minneapolis Lakers’ All-Star center, George Mikan began life in 1924 as the son of a Joliet, Ill., tavern owner. He studied to become a priest, then switched to law, before his prowess on the hardwood led him to the emerging sport of professional basketball. At DePaul University, he established himself as one of the nation’s best players and led his team to a collegiate championship. His dominance as a center earned him a contract with the Chicago American Gears. Schumacher provides a detailed account of how Mikan altered the way basketball was played by proving that a center could do more than leap for the jump ball to start games. He became a pre-eminent scorer, so unstoppable that several rule changes were made specifically to limit his dominance. Schumacher also shows the evolution of professional basketball, as the sport’s rising popularity convinced owners that it could be a lucrative business. But he doesn’t sentimentalize the past: Mikan staged a holdout when the financially strapped Gears tried to cut his salary, Schumacher notes, and he expected his teammates to defer to him at all times. He went to the Lakers in 1947, and his intensity brought the team multiple titles. Recognized by the NBA in 1996 as one of its 50 greatest players of all time, he tirelessly crusaded to get better pensions for former players. The men who had established the league that allowed players like Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Garnett to earn $100-million contracts, Mikan reminded fans, received a mere $1,700 per month in retirement benefits. He made significant progress for his fellow retired players, but lost a leg and several fingers to diabetes before dying in 2005.
A compelling portrait of a dynamic and influential man, on and off the court.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-213-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
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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