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IN SEARCH OF TIGER

A JOURNEY THROUGH GOLF WITH TIGER WOODS

Whatever Callahan is driving at here, it remains a mystery.

Golf Digest columnist Callahan takes an unfocused dip into the world of professional golf, intending to use Tiger Woods as his lodestone.

His narrative, however, is too unbridled to have a central character. Nothing original will be gleaned from these pages as pertains to Woods, who continues to be a pleasant and graceful cipher. Callahan’s report that Tiger is a naturally gifted golfer who works hard at his game to achieve a thrilling level of control over the ball is not late-breaking news. Woods’s coach, Butch Harmon, may say, “Golf’s a fickle game . . . even the great ones find it, lose it, find it again, lose it again,” but Woods has pretty much found and held his game. Callahan tries to get some mileage out of the father-son theme that has developed of late among golfers—Tiger and his dad, the Duvals, the Harmons, the Nicklauses, the not-so-recent Morrises, even Michael and James Jordan make it into the picture—but this doesn’t really lead anywhere other than some mildly interesting human-interest material. Mostly noticeable here are the qualities Woods doesn’t have. He lacks a sense of humor, at least in public; while Jasper Parnevik has the wit to say that golf is “a very strange game to have as a job,” Woods bristles that “second sucks, and third is worse.” He’ll never make it into golf’s long line of endearing eccentrics like John Daly (of whom Callahan remarks, “Though John thought [his fiancée] was twenty-nine and single, she was actually thirty-nine and married. This represented a pretty good capsule of his grasp on things”). And in dealing with Augusta National’s moronic traditions, Wood could use some of the ethical mettle Lee Trevino displayed in the 1970s. Highlighting the golfer’s faults is clearly unintentional, since Callahan is obviously a fan, but it’s typical of the author’s failure to control his material.

Whatever Callahan is driving at here, it remains a mystery.

Pub Date: April 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-609-60943-2

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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