An enjoyable book about golf for golfers who play the game and enjoy reading about its history.
An insider chronicles the career of the great golfer.
Veteran sports reporter Callahan (His Father’s Son: Earl and Tiger Woods, 2010, etc.) has wanted to write a book like this for a long time. He’s a die-hard Arnold Palmer (1929-2016) fan and has tremendous admiration for Palmer’s “considerate heart.” He describes his subject as “equal parts humble and proud…equal parts commoner and king.” He interviewed Palmer many times and has had countless conversations with players about him. Callahan begins in 1960 because “Palmer didn’t formally become Palmer until the 1960 U.S. Open,” which he won in dramatic fashion. He won eight more times that year, including the Masters. The author traces Palmer’s career chronologically by key years. “1929” briefly covers his early years and the immense influence his father had on him and his game. He discusses Palmer’s amateur wins in chapters “1950” and “1954.” Then came “1955” and his first professional win, the Canadian Open. It was followed by 61 more PGA wins and countless others. Callahan goes into great detail describing key shots and the clubs used and pressure-filled shots he had to pull off to win a tournament. Along the way, he provides fascinating miniprofiles of lesser-known players—e.g., Don Cherry and Tommy Bolt—and discusses the competitive “vinegar” that often spilled out between Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Callahan’s lively and brisk writing style makes for an eminently readable book jam-packed with anecdotes and stories golfers will love—as well as nice tidbits, like how players used to pool purses among themselves, a “common but secret practice then.” Callahan provides a special section of personal comments from a wide variety of people who knew and loved Palmer, as well as some 80 pages of lists—tournaments and matches won, scores, earnings, statues and even streets named after Palmer.
An enjoyable book about golf for golfers who play the game and enjoy reading about its history.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243972-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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
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
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