A well-written, impassioned story of sports, friendship, and determination.
A tale of unlikely friendships and camaraderie forged through ice hockey.
Just before the opening of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, the South Korean women’s ice hockey team became the only team to include North Koreans on its roster. The Unified team fought hard on the ice, but their opponents proved too strong, and the team lost each of their matches. Nonetheless, they won the hearts of Koreans from both sides as well as those from countries around the world. In this feel-good tale of women athletes suddenly placed in the international spotlight, New York Times contributor Berkman takes readers behind the scenes of the South Korean team. He shows each player’s immense passion for a sport that was often not considered suitable for young women. He discusses the American and Canadian Koreans, or “imports,” who were brought in to bolster the team prior to the games and the impact they had on the South Koreans. He shares each woman’s hopes, dreams, and determination to play despite the odds and sacrifices each needed to make, including using old equipment and practicing at late hours due to lack of funds and support from sponsors. “Prior to South Korea being named the host of the 2018 Olympics,” writes the author, “a majority of the women’s team felt that [the Korean Ice Hockey Association] never really cared about them to begin with. Even before the Games, they earned just $50 a day.” In addition to exploring the gender discrimination at play, Berkman weaves in bits of history about the two Koreas and their hostilities toward Japan. Ultimately, what shines through is the women’s passion for their sport and the bonds they forged on and off the ice, alliances that cross an array of boundaries.
A well-written, impassioned story of sports, friendship, and determination.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-335-00553-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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