An intriguing account with insights into competition and control.
A woman recounts how she conquered the male-dominated world of competitive shooting in this debut memoir.
Koo does not fit the usual profile of an expert pistol shooter. Her race, gender, and age all make her something of an outlier, but this has not kept her from becoming a record-setting winner at “the NRA National Action Pistol Championship, known as the Bianchi Cup.” The Hong Kong–born, San Francisco–raised Koo did not even begin shooting until her late 40s, and so this memoir has quite a bit to cover of the champion’s life before she ever picked up a gun. She discusses her early years in China and the experience of immigrating to California, where her conservative parents continued to keep a traditional Chinese household. She describes meeting her future husband, Carlos, with whom she would raise children and start a real estate business—though both those things included significant strife and tragedy. Koo alternates between recounting a career-threatening accident in 2013 and her subsequent recovery and trials from earlier in her life: the death of one of her children in infancy, her husband’s extramarital affair, and her first firearm safety class, which she enrolled in specifically to allay her fear of guns. Throughout her meteoric rise in the world of shooting, she reaffirmed her faith in God, her family, and herself—a woman who never allowed men to determine her place in the world. With the help of debut author Pahl, Koo tells her story in accessible, precise prose that mimics her controlled persona while nevertheless displaying some affecting cracks: “I couldn’t stop looking at the photo. As I stared at it, I started to shake uncontrollably. I felt like my legs had been cut out from beneath me. Who was the woman, and what was she doing with my husband?” Readers acquainted with Koo’s shooting career will likely be especially interested in this book, but much here is familiar and universal. As an immigrant, mother, and wife committed to her family business, Koo will likely remind many readers of close relatives or themselves.
An intriguing account with insights into competition and control.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-8849-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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