Rating: 
Summary: Hating your Father as Basketball
Review: Having been a college basketball player eons ago, I looked forward to this book. My mid-point, I was forcing my self to read it. In his previous books he tells us how much he hates his father. This book is just another chapter in that process. However, in the end, he tells us his father was revered when he died. Maybe there will be a new book telling us how much he loved his father.I liked the first part of the book, when basketball was a major part of his life. I had felt that once also. But I don't remember all that anquish over losing. Incidently, his college coach was tough, unyielding, and unfair. Conroy's father met his match!In the prologue, Conroy describes his many bouts with madness and that he had crazy spells during every novel he wrote. Well, this novel is another one, written by a crazy man.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb! Conroy Get's Better With Every Book
Review: I have read all of Pat Conroy's books, even "The Great Santini" which I hated because of the cruelty in the story. Essentially, Conroy has detailed his life in his books and reading them has been a wonderful revelation. In this book about life-and-basketball, Conroy brings us up-to-date on his life and teaches us valuable lessons about every life. I was a basketball nut also and played the game until I was over thirty. This book is written so beautifully, with such truth and panache, that it brought me to tears. I love Pat Conroy as a wonderful human being and an aauthor who has taught me so much in such a lovely way. Thanks, Pat. Keep writing!
Rating: 
Summary: Great prose but author tries too hard
Review: I just finished reading Conroy's latest work of non-fiction. Let me say first of all that I enjoyed reading this book, mainly for the excellent descriptions of the basketball in its pages. Conroy does an excellent job of getting inside this one particular season and the reader feels both the joys and the pains of every close victory, missed lay-up, or easy dismantling by an opponent. Conroy gives us a powerful glimpse of what it is like to play high level basketball and his prose is both descriptive and emotional.
What doesn't seem to work is portrayal of himself and those close to him whom he did not like. I found that his humility was not believable - that while he says he was not a good point guard, he indeed felt quite the opposite. And his portrayal of his father and his coach seemed hyperbolic and imaginary. How could anyone - and some of his teammates did - like a man such as his coach, Mel Thompson. It would have been nice to get a closer look at those qualities that made some on his team appreciate the coach.
His portrayal of his father was also somewhat unbelievable. It is hard to believe that a man as tyrannical as his father would try and change his ways later in life. Again, I was left wondering if his portrayal was one of hyperbole and lacked objectivity.
Rating: 
Summary: A season in purgatory
Review: Pat Conroy had a fine senior season as the quintessential scrambling, scrappy, full-hustle, poor-shooting point guard for an unfulfilled-potential, surprisingly mediocre Citadel team. Memories of the high point of his athletic, competitive and physical fitness provide a rich tapestry without the cynicism and commercialism drowning most of college athletics today. For the many ex-jocks, especially those who peaked as young men, this is a pleasant, sentimental ride back in time. There is an almost syrupy subplot, crossing Conroy's Catholic innocence and Citadel monastic life with a beautiful, pregnant young woman that he befriends, develops a crush on, and loses in another tragic life event.But some things are troubling or do not ring true. As in his other semi-autobiographical works, his sadistic father more than haunts Conroy. The author as a young man is beaten and slapped silly, almost hard for the reader to stomach and to understand of an athlete at the peak of his physical strength. Thirty years later and eighty pounds heavier Conroy seems to doubt the sincerity of his dad, now chastised by the author's characterization of him in "The Great Santini". There is also Conroy's apparent love-hate relationship with the Citadel and it is not clear that Conroy has made up his mind on this topic, despite rapprochement later in his life. Then there is the losing season itself. Conroy is a bit too self-deprecating. He was an all-state athlete and despite his self-criticism during this strange season (and a coach prone to shouting, "Don't shoot, Conroy!"), he was often a prolific scorer and he was named MVP for the team. His teammates, many of them described as marvelous players, all seem to chafe and wither under the eye of a sphinx-like Coach Thompson, a man who tries to ignore or to pretend that the Citadel's time-consuming discipline of life does not exist. And the intimate details of each game, unearthed after thirty years, are too detailed to come across as dead on accurate. And boy can these boys cuss! My 1960's coaches would have benched me for just about any one of the many words these guys use to pepper their trash talk. The final irony for me was the almost inexplicable later reverence shown for Coach Thompson, a man who is portrayed throughout the season is a callous person, out of touch with his players, unable to employ their multiple talents properly, and prone to piques of fury that lead him to bench and apparently willfully destroy All-Americans in the making. It is difficult to discern where the truth ends and where faded memories and fiction take over.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing like it in the world
Review: I don't know Pat Conroy personally but I have read all his books and he is one of those authors behind whose words you find a friend. He brings a life to his losing season that makes it as fine a recollection as if his team had won each of their bittersweet games. It may be true that this book appeals to those who look back on youth through the more diffused light of middle age. Yet it is as fine a study of time and remembrance that I know of, more readable than Proust and equal, I think, to Thomas Williams' wonderful "The Moon Pinnace".
Rating:
Summary: First time Conroy reader brought to him through basketball
Review: While I have always been interested in Conroy's books I had never really picked one up for a variety of reasons. After reading the excerpts in Sports Illustrated, I became interested in the book due to my love of basketball. I found the descriptions of the games and action to be very realistic and detailed and the pace to be good. I kept wanting the team to improve and Coach Mel to realize that he was destroying the team with poor coaching but it never happened. I am interested in reading more of Conroy now and look forward to comparing the earlier fiction works to this book. There seems to be a common theme among the reviewers that long-time Conroy fans aren't as excited about this novel but first time readers and basketball fans are.
Rating:
Summary: The older I get, the better I was...
Review: I've enjoyed Pat Conroy's stories since seeing the movie "The Great Santini". This autobiographical story revolves around Conroy's senior year at The Citadel. "El Cid", the military prep college in Charleston, SC, actually is such a force it's like a protagonist in the book. A harsh place in a lush land that still had corners to retreat to and understanding professors who actually encouraged the students to keep pushing on and hoping. His beloved father is his same ogre self in this book also, with a few surprises. He understates the theme but Coach Mel Thompson and the Great Santini deliver a similar impact to bewildered youths. I didn't know Conroy's writing style was so sophisticated. His natural voice flows smoothly and his points are easily understood. I think he pens enough detail about how he's feeling that it reminds a lot of us older boys what it was like back when. So his content is as universal as the white canvas Chuck Taylor's on the cover. The book retells his experiences as a self-professed mediocre point guard for "El Cid's" hoops team in the mid 60s. I took his self-deprecation lightly, after all, he made all-state, and was a walk-on. He's clearly superior to the millions of us who've never made the college ball (high school?) cut. El Cid's "Hell Week" for the frosh is described saltily and Conroy makes the chaos sound sadistic and cruel. If you did so many push ups you couldn't lift your arms to take off your shirt, you'd agree you'd done enough push ups. Still, this is a book about memories. Memories are fickle, like a reflected image in a wavy lake. Travel with him, as he turns back the clock to the time of youth. You can tell he wrote this as an attempt to examine a huge part of what made our author who he is today. Pat C. researched the season with his teammates and their wives and reconstructed it as faithfully as he could. [Caution non-basketball fans: this book is 50% basketball action from a point guard's point of view]. Conroy's a good enough writer to allow the mysteries of old to remain the mysteries they will always be. I.e. what really is up with Coach Thompson? There's no denying he loves the game. With him, it's very personal. It's a great read in Feb-March with 1000s of young men and women all involved in High School, NCAA and NIT tournaments. As a former guard, watching the great players of the game today, I focus on the point guards and wonder which cutting teammate I'd pass to if I had the ball.
Rating:
Summary: Of interest to fans of Pat Conroy .
Review: I almost dropped the book when I turned the page to the chapter entitled "Annie Kate." There was a real Annie Kate! Dennis Miller once said about his own dad: "My dad made The Great Santini look like Leo Buscaglia." I knew what he meant. And after you read this book you realize that the fictionalized Great Santini definitely had more heart than the real one. [Sorry Pat.] Pat Conroy's life.....basketball, a way with words, and some really good people along the way as the shining beacons in the midst of a long march through a dark Hell. Pat Conroy....one tough guy and a survivor. The bad guys truely ARE BAD. Lot's of long discussions on basketball which will go right over the head of the basketball-ignorant. Worth a read if you are interested in Pat Conroy and where his stories come from.
Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: Do not waste your time on this one. This over written, overly long book would have made a nice magazine article, but as a full-blown work it is much ado about nothing. There seems to be nothing here that sets this team apart from any other of the hundreds of teams every year at colleges all over the country. At the end of the book I did not care one bit about any of the players on the team including Conroy, whose insecurity and self-loathing throughout the book is almost unbearable. If you are looking for a "year in the life" basketball book, read "A Season on the BrinKk" by John Feinstein or "The Breaks of the Game" by David Halberstam. Both are far superior to this mess.
Rating:
Summary: the losing team
Review: i was going to give this book 3 stars for the way conroy detailed the act of playing the game which didnt do anything for me throughout the book. It gained two additional stars when the final chapters revealed his father's deathbed and his revealing the possiblility of writing a book about his father's life and how he came to terms with him. Key moments are his father's comments how he was going to portray him and who the actor would be--possibly Robert Duval again as the aged father.
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