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Title: My Losing Season by PAT CONROY ISBN: 0-553-38190-3 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Rivetting, Intriguing Memoir
Comment: Mr. Conroy is arguably one of the best writers living. This memoir focuses on his senior year at The Citadel, The Military College of SC-recently in the headlines for the losing battle to remain all-male. It offers keen insights into his life through writing of the highest level.
Conroy's tale follows his senior year but also delves into his life as it centers around his basketball and academic careers. At the forefront of the scenes from his life is the maniacal behavior of his father, an abusive, sadistic marine who was a tortuous figure throughout Conroy's youth.
I found the story of Conroy's development as a lover of books and as a writer extremely interesting. One could even surmise that all the events of his life served as ingredients to making him a great novelist.
One cannot help but to ride on the emotional rollercoaster that this book creates as it follows Conroy's ups and downs on and off the basketball court. As he writes about specific games he played, it reads like the play-by-play to the NCAA championship game, which every game was to Conroy.
The book offers great details about his relationships to other players and people in his life, including teachers, who made a lasting mark on him.
As a Citadel graduate and athlete, I found the memoir to paint accurate illustrations of life as a Citadel athlete, trying to excel in a sport when everything seems to be against you-the school, the coach, the students-everything.
I don't think any reader will be disappointed in this book. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5
Summary: Nice job Pat
Comment: More than a great sports book, which it is, My Losing Season is a story about resiliency and one boy's lifelong, ongoing journey through the trauma of child abuse and domestic violence. Pat Conroy shows how his deep love for basketball and writing, detailed in a memoir of his senior basketball season at the Citadel, helps him to transcend, if not escape, a shattered childhood. Conroy's reconstruction of his final season, on and off the court, includes detailed descriptions of game to game action and analysis of the social and psychological landscape that he and his teammates endured.
Conroy brings the games of his final year to life in a way that the reader cares about the outcome of each one described and is often left on the edge of his or her seat awaiting the final outcome. He also brings the situational surround to life in a way that the reader cares about Pat and his teammates, again awaiting the final outcome of the bigger game that awaits them, beyond their losing season.
Although there is a hopeful message that Conroy conveys in what can be gained from the hardship and hurt of a losing season, what I am left with most powerfully is that no matter what he accomplishes in his life the lens of a scarred childhood is always his looking glass, distorting all that illuminates his gifts, talents, and hard fought accomplishments. His life evokes in me a desire to drape my arm around his shoulder and, although I am a younger man that he, to say to him, "Nice job son." And so if you're reading this Pat, nice job, really nice job. And if anyone else is reading this, I highly recommend My Losing Season.
Rating: 1
Summary: an admirable introduction followed by bathos and howlers
Comment: A memoir is by definition a re-creation, and no such work can possibly be completely factual, nor should it be. But after a promising introduction which candidly reveals the author's personal struggles -- struggles all too common in men, especially Southern men -- this work lapses into bathos and what strikes me in one instance as a completely unbelievable "event" in the author's life -- and I am a speaking as a native Georgian who was one of two white players on one of the first desegregated teams in that state's history.
The bathos is typified by what I call the "Bob Costas Syndrome": it is possible to enjoy sports intensely without referring to a high school point guard's exploits as "magnificent" and "heroic"; not even Michael Jordan at his greatest was "heroic." Jackie Robinson was heroic indeed, butleast of all for his amazing athletic skills. As I write this the news of the death of another American soldier in Afghanistan is playing on every channel: a former NFL player who walked away from the "heroic" "war zone" of the football field and from millions of dollars to enlist with his brother as an Army Ranger. Sports may possibly build character, a debate which sports increasingly seems to be losing, but PLEASE spare me the grandiose adjectives. Perhaps NOW we will have a moratorium on writers and athletes employing hyperbolic terms such as "warrior" etc. Such romanticizing betrays a poverty of vision especially insulting in our current epoch.
The "event" I find completely incredible centers on a supposed train-trip encounter in the early 1960s between the author and an African American girl (who curiously remains unnamed, though the author tells us he "was in love with her" and though he seems to remember the names of every opposing player, coach, referee, and gym custodian from his kindergarten through college years). This young woman, traveling alone (luckily for her and the author, on one of the only desegregated trains in 1960s America), sits down VOLUNTARILY across from the white author, who subsequently reveals he is from the South. This revelation being a famous ice-breaker with African Americans in the 60s, they become friendly, their meeting just happens to coincide with MLK's "Dream" speech, which they conveniently just happen to be able to pick up on am radio on a moving train, and they even tour Cincinatti together on a stopover.
Perhaps this young African American woman was from Mars, not the United States. Perhaps her parents actually did put her on a train alone and encouraged her to strike up conversations with white boys, especially Southern white boys. Perhaps they encouraged her to WALK AROUND ONE OF THE MOST RACIALLY DIVISIVE CITIES IN THE COUNTRY WITH AFOREMENTIONED WHITE BOY. But based on my experiences as a Southerner who grew up in the maelstrom, the epicenter of the Civl Rights Era, I find such an "event" completely fantastic: the sad truth is that no woman of color in the South could afford or would dare initiate a playful Q and A with a white male on a train (especially one traveling from Nebraska-- hardly a bastion of civil rights itself -- to the Deep South).
This nameless woman of course cannot be tracked down (and therefore, conveniently, the story cannot be verified nor proven false). Thus she remains, in my view, a princess in a wish-fulfillment fairy tale of a world that never existed in a South and a United States that was and remains much more racist than most white people can or will admit.
After all, what fate ultimately befell the great orator who uttered the "Dream" speech that Conroy and his fairy princess supposedly listened to so rapturously?
And how are we to believe the author's contention that sports builds noble traits when we are confronted with such a risibly unbelievable "event"?
Perhaps Conroy thereby makes more points about sports then he intends. Certainly this "event," clearly designed to show how progressive and good hearted the author was for his place and time, insults the memory of the deathless speech that it invokes.
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Title: The Great Santini by Pat Conroy ISBN: 0553268929 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 December, 1987 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Lords of Discipline by Pat Conroy ISBN: 0553271369 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 January, 1982 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Water Is Wide by PAT CONROY ISBN: 0553268937 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 November, 1987 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: Beach Music by Pat Conroy ISBN: 0553574574 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1996 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy ISBN: 0553268880 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 December, 1987 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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