While the FBI investigation continues to play itself out in court, Sokolove’s welcome context could well influence the court...
Though focusing on one disgraced coach and his former program, this exposé shows just how wide and deep is the corruption corroding men’s college basketball.
The financial figures are staggering. The Louisville basketball program, the most profitable in the nation, generated $45.6 million in 2017, the year in which the third scandal under coach Rick Pitino cost him his job. Each year, March Madness alone generates “more than $10 billion” in wagers, and in 2017, the NCAA itself made more than $1 billion in revenue, much of it from TV rights. Even websites that report on recruiting “have been acquired by or merged with larger corporate partners in deals worth at least $300 million in total.” As New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sokolove (Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater, 2014, etc.) effectively puts in perspective, the scandal that cost Pitino his job and has kept a prize recruit from eligibility during his first two years in college involves only $100,000, less than a fifth of which was ever paid by the shoe company that was supposed to funnel it to the recruit’s father. There have been no criminal charges filed against Pitino or the recruit and no evidence that either had knowledge of the payments. Yet the author’s reporting makes it clear that Pitino knew more than he has been willing to admit about how the recruiting game is played. This is true of most big-time coaches and knowledgeable fans, who know about major corporations and fast-talking hustlers trying to get their hooks into promising players as young as grade school and steer them to colleges that have contractual ties with shoe companies. It’s “a climate of moral rot” that will exist as long as college basketball generates huge sums of money while those who play the game, often from underprivileged families, are supposed to receive nothing.
While the FBI investigation continues to play itself out in court, Sokolove’s welcome context could well influence the court of public opinion.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56327-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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