My Losing Season: A Memoir
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- ISBN13: 9780553381900
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
PAT CONROY—AMERICA’S MOST BELOVED STORYTELLER—IS BACK!
“I was born to be a point guard, but not a very excellent one. . . .There was a time in my life when I walked through the world known to myself and others as an athlete. It was part of my own definition of who I was and certainly the part I most respected. When I was a young man, I was well-built and agile and ready for the rough and tumble of games, and athletics provided the single outlet for a repressed and preternaturally shy boy to prompt himself in public….I lost myself in the beauty of sport and made my family tree proud while passing through the silent eye of the storm that was my childhood.”
So starts Pat Conroy’s journey back to 1967 and his startling realization “that this season had been seminal and easily the most consequential of my life.” The place is the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, that now legendary military college, and in memory Conroy gathers around him his team to relive their few triumphs and humiliating defeats. In a narrative that moves seamlessly between the action of the season and flashbacks into his childhood, we see the leader’s like of basketball and how crucial the role of athlete is to all these young men who are struggling to find their own identity and their place in the world.
In quick-paced exhilarating games, readers will laugh in delight and weep in disappointment. But as the tale continues, we gradually see the self-professed “mediocre” athlete merge into the point guard whose spirit drives the team. He rallies them to play their best while closing off the shouts of “Don’t shoot, Conroy” that come from the coach on the sidelines. For Coach Mel Thompson is to Conroy the undermining presence that his father had been throughout his childhood. And in these pages finally, heartbreakingly, we learn the truth about the Fantastic Santini.
In My Losing Season Pat Conroy has written an American classic about young men and the bonds they form, about losing and the lessons it imparts, about finding one’s voice and one’s self in the midst of defeat. And in his trademark language, we see the young Conroy walk from his life as an athlete to the writer the world knows him to be.
From the Hardcover edition.
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The review of My Losing Season in the New York Times Book Review gets this book absolutely right. That is, the book is just unadorned dreadful.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
If you like to read page after page of dribble, dribble, shoot, then you will like this book. If you are not interested in the details of basketball, then you better save your money. Pat Conroy has run out of steam and needs to place the theme of his father and basketball to rest. He has gone from an brilliant writer to a sell-out looking to make a quick dollar on a book that could have been written on a piece of toilet paper. Sorry, but the facts are the facts.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
chens and kwan, do not even reflect about reading it!
laaaaaaaaaaate
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
books made into movies. He doesn’t like his coach. But, his coach seems to be a excellent guy who is dealing with a bunch of spoiled brats and Pat Conroy seems the most spoiled of all. I agree with the reviewer who said he won’t read anymore Pat Conroy books. His themes are permanently the same and they are all self-pitying. He’s become a one trick pony and I’m tired of the trick. Read his two first books and skip the rest.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This is a very disturbing book. Conroy has already told some of these tales through his fiction, but here the varnish has been removed, and we see the vicious cruelty of his demeaning father, his dishonest and petty coach, and his malicious college, The Citadel. Conroy tells these tales convincingly and describes the results of this cruelty on him and his siblings, teammates, and fellow cadets as “ruined” lives. Remarkably, he says that he “likes” his father, his coach, and his school and seems to judge that their viciousness somehow strengthened persons they affected.
On one level, this can be read as an extraordinarily forgiving. On another, it can be seen as yet another effect of the cruelty, that even after all these years, Conroy continues to want to be accepted and esteemed by his tormentors. Where it gets particularly twisted, but, is in his conclusions about the Vietnam war. Although he acknowledges that the United States was incorrect to be involved there, he considers the American participants as “heroic.” He especially esteems a ex- teammate whose plane crashed and who was marched many miles to a prison camp; the real heroes, whose actions he describes but rumor has it that does not see, are the man’s Vietnamese captors, who nurse back to health the man who had been trying to kill them and then protect him against the citizenry that wants to kill him. Is it more heroic to save one’s one life or the life of an enemy?
Conroy is rightly horrified by an anti-war speaker’s recommendation that American soldiers in Vietnam should kill their officers, but he expresses no similar horror for their killing of the Vietnamese soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians. Despite the fact that he believes the United States had no business there, Conroy writes that “I wish that I had entered into the Marine Corps and led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I want to reflect I would have trained my Marines well and that the Vietcong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with my men.” So Conroy wants to exorcize his personal demons, inflicted upon him by brutal military men and institutions, by killing people who do not deserve it.
Like Conroy, I have stood at the Vietnam Memorial and wept. I have seen in the polished stone of that wall my reflection interrupted by the names carved in the wall and recognizable the metaphor; I am incomplete because of these deaths. But I had another result as well: I wondered why the wall isn’t several times longer so that it can also contain the names of the Vietnamese dead, persons men, women, and children who were killed in our names and whose loss also diminishes us.
Conroy has no distress acknowledging the humanity of his opponents on the basketball court. Why is it so tough for him to honor and respect the Vietnamese?
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5