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Summary: Conroy's Winning Season
Review: Overcoming an abusive father and an abrasive basketball coach, Pat Conroy describes his life in basketball through his senior season in college. Despite being both physically and mentally beaten by the cadet system at the Citadel and a father worse than any Conroy has previously described in his novels, Pat discovers his inner voice during what he titles his "Losing Season." More importantly, he begins listening to that inner voice and following it rather than the coach who screams "don't shoot" and the father who continually berates him. This is a story that goes beyond sports to more important issues.Well written, reads like a novel. Deserves to be read.
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Summary: My losing Season
Review: Pat Conroy's book My Losing Season Is about Pat in his early years trying to take his basketball team to the championship but he finds it hard. He has to determine whether or not his family is more important to him than basketball. He deals with his father's abuse and disapproval of what he is doing. This has been one of the best book that I have ever read. Anyone who likes basketball or has played any sport would love this book.
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Summary: Losers can be Winners
Review: Pat has done it again, but this book has both personal and career symbolism. I believe that "Losing" can make you stronger in anything that you do in life. Great job!
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Summary: My Losing Season by Pat Conroy/Non-Fiction/Bantam Trade Publ
Review: The memoir in question here is entitled My Losing Season by Pat Conroy. This story is set during the author's years as a cadet in the military school; the Citadel. It is a coming of age story told through Conroy's life as a struggling point guard on the Citadel basketball team. Set in the 1960s, Conroy portrays the hardships and bonds that form within each cadet as they go through the difficult Citadel system. Conroy first begins this tale by describing his battered childhood. His military, overpowering father and simpleton mother give Conroy a troubled beginning, which hurts him as he enters the system. Although this was in the beginning detrimental, his fear of going home forced him to remain in the difficult "plebe" system and wait out the difficult freshman year. The story begins at the beginning Conroy's rookie year in the Plebe system, where he was beaten and screamed into a man. He gives a gruesome portrayal of this difficult freshman year that pretty much erased any hope the Citadel had on my choice College sheet. The majority of the rest of the book is spent re-creating his senior year, telling tales of point guards he played against, the hardships of losing, and the sweet tastes of victory.
Pat Conroy brings to life this story in a style of writing that does not immediately grab the reader, but if you can stay with the book for a chapter or two, you will find yourself turning the pages quicker and quicker. This style is powerfully represented in My Losing Season and throughout it; Conroy brings about the emerging conflict, although slow at times. Unlike many other non-fiction pieces, the conflict in this is not an obvious one. Many of tales within his career as a cadet have their own conflicts. For instance, in the first part of the memoir, Conroy goes on about his painful freshman year, but truly gives a sense of what it was like to be an 18 year old naïve midwestern boy in a taxing, military life. His depiction of one crucial night as a "plebe" is truly scary; "...They increased the volume of their voices until it seemed that this bedlam of noise and hate was worldwide and my brain was afire and lost and making no connections..." (115). This agonizing description goes on for quite a few pages and by the end becomes monotonous.
This memoir truly shows how difficult, but in the end rewarding a term at the Citadel really was for Pat Conroy. I found it quite moving and intriguing that one could see this once naïve and helpless plebe become this strong, intelligent, military man. It portrayed Conroy at first as a helpless youngster, but throughout the book shows his evolution into a self sufficeint young man and although it was indeed long at times, shows the maturity of Conroy. Although the title, My Losing Season, does indeed lead a reader to believe it to be a tale solely on basketball, do not be misled. This book gives the story of a boy becoming a man and does so quite eloquently.
I did enjoy this take on Military and college life in the sixties. Although I myself have not had this experience, I found myself quite intrigued by Conroy's ability to paint a detailed picture in one's mind of the true happiness and horrible sorrow one can face during the course of merely four years. Immediately, I must admit I was not immediately drawn to this book, but by even the end of the first chapter, I was hooked in. Conroy's detailed style of writing bored me at times, and his sometimes digressive approach at story telling was ever so often hard to understand, I found this memoir to be quite cogently written.
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Summary: Lacerating. . .
Review: There's a scene in a 1970s movie in which Gene Hackman tries to grind up a broken wine glass in a garbage disposal. Reading this book is a lot like that. I picked up "My Losing Season" not as a great fan of Pat Conroy or as a former athlete. I was attracted more by the theme of loss and its lessons. And I expected a different personal story than the one Conroy tells. The losing basketball season in his last year as a cadet at The Citadel in Charleston, SC, is a pretext for a much deeper theme - survival in the face of humiliation. And it's not the losses of the games that are humiliating. On the one hand is the brutal and unrelenting contempt of his marine colonel father, a child abuser and wife beater. On the other hand is the withering scorn of Conroy's arbitrary and capricious coach, Mel Thompson. Both, in Conroy's account, do their best to beat the spirit out of the boy who has grown into an indomitable (though undersized and modestly talented) point guard for his team. And all of this takes place in the regimented, fierce, all-male environment of The Citadel in the 1960s, where incoming boys are routinely broken by the merciless hazing of their upperclassmen. Humiliation is a much more difficult subject than loss to deal with. Loss leaves scars, but humiliation remains an open wound, and in writing about it there is the risk of slipping into the tug of war between self-pity and self-blame. Conroy takes us there sometimes, and those are the parts of his story that are lacerating. But win or lose, the ups and downs of the season are fascinating and the accounts of the games are thrilling. As a writer, he has a gift for hustling the reader with suspense and drama and sudden shifts of mood. As an observer of character, he vividly brings to life the individual boys who make up the team. As someone deeply wounded, he is able to freely and convincingly express the many articulations of the heart - especially love, admiration, and gratitude. Once I started into this book, I could not put it down. It kept me reading late into the night. And when I wasn't reading, it filled my thoughts, as I'm sure it will for a long time. It's a troubling book that wants to resolve a host of dark memories. And it may well want to show the reader how to do the same. I'm not sure that it's completely successful in either regard. And maybe that's the point. It's enough to recast humiliation as loss. That is a wound that can eventually heal.
Rating: 
Summary: mediocre
Review: This book was mediocre at best. Self-serving at times, Introduced too many characters making it difficult to follow. Like most Conroy novels, reverts back to his abusive Father to try and liven story.
I suspect he dramatized much of the story like Bissinger did in "Friday Night Lights"
After this and the convoluted "Beach Music", I doubt I'll read another Conroy novel.
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Summary: Does honesty have a season?
Review: This is a well-written book for anyone who ever experienced failure or the fear of failure while trying very hard to succeed. "My Losing Season" is an autobiography that focuses on the author's senior year as a college basketball player at The Citadel, the famous military school in Charleston, South Carolina. The Citadel Code begins with, "To revere God, love my country, and be loyal to The Citadel. To be faithful, honest, and sincere in every act and purpose and to know that honorable failure is better than success by unfairness or cheating."
This book holds a demonstration of how to grow more honest with oneself and sincere with others. This is a story of fear, sadism, injury, failure and loss and how these can lead to courage and achievement or degradation and estrangement.
In a way that smells like truth, Conroy tells his story, reconstructing memories over 30 years old. His understanding matures as he reconnects with the shattered team of his youth and the boy that failed them. He doesn't blame, he reveals - everything. When Conroy writes about himself, he is telling the truth about all of us. When reading this poetic work, one cannot avoid feeling connected to deeper truths of the human condition. There is no better way to spend one's reading time.
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Summary: Propoganda, not autobiography
Review: This is one of the few books I have thrown into the waste basket immediately after reading. In this autobiography, Pat Conroy portrays himself as a humble basketball player of little talent who, despite abuse and total degradation from his father and coach, just manages to make himself the most-valuable player on his team. Besides his father and his coach, all others -- fellow players on his team, players on opposing teams, other coaches, teachers, possible girl friends, wives of others, etc. --- are wonderful people who Mr. Conroy feels honoured to meet or play against. And Mr. Conroy trots out a new such wonderful person every few pages. Despite the never-ending verbal abuse by his coach, he feels honoured to have had him as his coach. His father, never ceasing to lay physical and verbal abuse on his son and on the rest of the family, finally is converted into a wonderful, loving father, but converted, according to Mr. Conway, by having read one of Mr. Conroy's books! I suppose one should never trust an autobiography to be fully honest, but this book seems to be propaganda rather than autobiography.
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Summary: LOVE Conroy!
Review: While I love Conroy's style of writing and lyrical descriptions, this book was too much about sports for my taste. OK, that's the point about the book, but it was extremely enjoyable despite the sports theme. The stories and conclusions about friends are excellent. I loved "Beach Music", "The Great Santini", "The Water is Wide", etc. and am eagerly awaiting the next Conroy book. I recommend to all, especially for sports lovers, but also for the non-sports people, too!
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