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My Losing Season (平装)
by Pat Conroy
| Category:
Autobiography |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
This story goes beyond basketball. It’s an inspiring tale of forgiveness, perseverance and the loyalty to one’s life-time dream. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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The Washington Post Book World (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
A superb accomplishment, maybe the finest book Pat Conroy has written. |
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Mark (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
My Losing Season is a true story of how a college basketball player trying to get the approval of his father. Yet, getting that approval is hard due to his father's expectations. Conroy tells a wonderful story that may leave some teary-eyed. Though it is a basketball story this one is for everyone. He shows that even in the tough times good things can come of them. With Conroy telling his about college playing days the reader feels as though he is playing in the game. This is a great read and one that you will remember for a long time. |
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Lawrence Slocky (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Conroy works emotion like Michelangelo did marble. An absolute master. I suggest that one read The Great Santini and The Lords of Discipline before My Losing Season to fully appreciate his artistry - as he develops the emotional nuances on his palette to weave fiction out of the auto- biographical details of his life. I was very moved when he spoke to Will McLean to have his doppelganger recede to the background so Pat Conroy could explain the facts of his heroic VMI game. Likewise when he explained how his father remade himself after the Great Santini - since Conroy took pains to embue Bull Meechum (Don Conroy) with a modicum of admirable traits his "real" father never had. But then again, perhaps Don/Bull did - and that realization may eventually come to Conroy in his twilight years.
Perhaps this book will serve as a final catharsis as regards his late father. If I have a criticism of My Losing Season, is that Conroy retains an adolescent angst while writing from the perspective of a middle aged man and that produces a sense of atrophied personal development. On re- reading the book, this was the message I got page after page: "Here I am, a 5'10" midget with no talent and I go on to be the team captain and MVP of my college basketball team. And, pal, all I got from my dad was a backhand across the puss. And all I and my teammates got from their coach and The Citadel was a figurative backhand as well. So, tell me, pal, who are the real losers here?"
One is left to wonder, as I am sure Conroy himself does, whether he would have attained such personal and career heights were it not for descending into the abyss that was the relationship with his father and with The Citadel. It could well be said that The Citadel has re-fashioned itself much as his father did. Such is the power of words well written. |
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Andrew Henry (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Although My Losing Season seems to resemble so many of Conroy's novels, there is nonetheless a refreshing new aspect. Yes, there is the same dark, violent characters of his novels, and Conroy's penchent for melodrama. And, many of the scenes seem to play over and over again in My Losing Season. However, the style had its effect on me when I felt my anger, disbelief and somber mood take hold as Conroy's basketball season goes into a full tailspin and their demeaning, capricious coach sucks the spirit out of the team.
The sparks came as Conroy's indomitable spirit refused to die and he often outplayed opponents who had much more athletic talent. He admired, and often adored, the talents of the point guard that he was set against in each game, but he never seemed to wilt. He gave no quarter and played with every once of his energy as I cheered him on and quickly turned the pages to find out which team won the game. It seemed as though playing against his opponent with everything he had was the highest compliment.
The book deals with more ambivalent feelings than you can shake a stick at. Conroy is elated to be a started and named team but feels guilty because some of his teammates are more worthy of the positions. He plays hard for his coach and staunchly defends him when he is fired, but spends a large portion of the story displaying his bitter resentment of the man that physically and emotionally flattened a talented team. He hated his abusive father yet has him attending a 30-year reunion of these teammates. He is appalled at the plebe system at The Citadel and the mean spirited hazing, yet he is extremely proud to march for his school and wear its ring.
The last part of the story is a reconciliation, of sorts. Conroy reconnects with many of his former teammates and his former coach, Mel Thompson, and discusses his anti-war activities and public criticisms of The Citadel. Although this section of the book is disjointed and at times feels like confessions of guilt and regret, there are a few parts that fit nicely to resolve that ill-fated basketball season that had ended 30 years ago.
In short, Conroy's story worked on me. I was often frustrated and shocked at the abusive relations with people and institutions, and at times the story seemed to float a dark palor above my head. Yet, I kept turning the pages to pick up those sparks in the darkness - Conroy has an indomitable spirit and an earnest demeanor, and he loves people (even the sordid ones).
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Ronald Sheer (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
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.
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Jonathan Groner (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Although the largest section of this book is entitled The Making of a Point Guard, the book's subject is actually the making of a writer. As far back as he can remember, Conroy wanted to play basketball, and for almost that long, he wanted to be a novelist. Both callings, he tells us, are fraught with difficulty, require long apprenticeships, and are borne out of intensely hard work and forged in a crucible of pain. Conroy's best novels emerge from the facts of his life - the abusive family in which he grew up and the formative experience of his college years at the Citadel. Rather than fictionalizing, in this book Conroy tries to explain who he is and how he got that way.
"It is time itself I am trying to retrieve," Conroy writes on page 137. "I long to pin it down in the surreal hyacinth-light of both memory and dream that now have faded where once they were three-dimensional and rich… It was the year I woke up to the dream of my own life. As I walked across the parade ground during the first week, I began the long, terrify- ing process of turning myself into the southern writer my mother had told me I would be since I was five years old." This passage is typical of Conroy at his best - the anguish over the passing of time, the emotional pain, the southern sense of destiny, even the (literally) flowery language.
Just as Conroy frequently despairs that he will never be a truly great point guard, he often says he will never be a writer on the level of Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and the other southern novelists whose work he has breathed in. All he can do is the best that he is capable of, just the way this young man of limited basketball talents performed for the Citadel in 1966-67.
The novelist is like the point guard in another way as well, Conroy writes. The novelist "needs a strong ego, a sense of arrogance, complete knowledge of tempo, and control of the court." The novelist must thumb his nose at academics and critics the way a basketball player ignores jeers from spectators or trash talk from opponents. "The point guard knows that the world is fraught with pitfalls and dangers, and so does the novelist." And the novelist must "create the world" around him, just as the point guard leads the charge and creates the play.
This is not a basketball book but one that uses sports as a metaphor in a totally fresh manner.
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Thomas Leuze (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
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. |
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Costas (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
For the first half of this book I was thinking it would get a 3-star rating. I have never read any of Conroy's books, having only watched the film adaptations of Lords of Discipline and The Great Santini. I'm also the son of a Citadel man (Class of '60), which made me have more than a passing interest.
I thought that for the first part there was a little bit too much about the tough family life and upbringing he had. It is important for Conroy to write about it, obviously, but I got the unpleasant picture after a few anecdotes and was more interested in getting to the part about his Citadel years.
His progression up to that point was interesting in telling us about his developing love for both the game of basketball and for literature/poetry. There are many great stories here that were then "ruined" by the lack of support and love (to put it mildly) he would get from his father and, to a lesser degree, his mother. I don't mean that in a bad way. Conroy is effectively showing us the bitterness he must have felt at the serious lack of love and encouragement this poor boy was subjected to.
Having heard some stories from my father about the Citadel, including about Hell Week and the Plebe System in general, I thought Conroy did a great job at showing the fear and horror that must have been experienced by every cadet entering the school. The few graduates I have met shared my father's own feelings (similar to Conroy's): they hated the place while they were there and then couldn't stop talking about it the rest of their lives. Most of them were successful later and most of them will attribute that success to the character-building and education they received at that school.
There are many lessons in this book about things like family, basketball, discipline, teamwork and leadership. Conroy's coach at the Citadel was an example in bad management and leadership. Many people still confuse strong leadership with good leadership and Conroy shows us, in the person of Coach Mel Thompson, how many teams they are not the same thing. Poor leadership, in the basic sense of even creating a sense of togetherness and feeling of "team", led to a season of under- achievement from a team that had the talent to have performed a lot better than it did. It is a lesson worth paying attention to by any kind of leader.
The book got a lot better for me once Conroy starts relating the story about his moment of change, when he decided to take matters into his own hands to achieve as much of his - and his team's - potential as he could. There are many moments after that, including the moments of reunions 25-30 years later, that frankly made my eyes water. Many knots are tied at the end of the book very deftly and effectively, including updates for the curious about The Great Santini's final years, some clarifications of stories from his previous books, the post-Citadel lives of the team, the Shannon Faulkner and women-in-the-Citadel issues and the eventual resolution of the antagonistic relation between Conroy and his alma mater that developed from the way he portrayed The Citadel in his earlier books.
Conroy is sometimes excessively frank, to the degree of discomfort for the reader. Sometimes he seems to wallow in too much self-pity. One wants to reach through the pages and give him a good talking-to to "buck up", but you can't say he is holding anything back from us.
Non-basketball fans may get a little bogged down in some of the game accounts he relates, but it is worth sticking with it for all the other good things this book offers.
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An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
You are more than just a reader of Pat Conroy's book My Losing Season, but a spectator of Conroy's life, mainly his basketball career at the Citadel. Conroy goes beyond mere statistics and recalling of events, but relives each basketball game using specific jargon to the sport to allow the reader to experience each game with Conroy. He captures every defining moment of the game-more than just the score and the high scorers. He goes through each game play by play, recalling each player on his team as well as each star player on the opposing team.
Conroy also encapsulates each character so they play more than just a role in Conroy's life. He creates his coach Mel Thompson as more than just a pitiless coach, but an enigma. To Conroy and his teammates, Thompson is an obscure, cruel coach, but Conroy gives an outside look. Around people unrelated to his team, Thompson is seen smiling and laughing. If caught laughing on the Citadel team around Thompson, the best that could happen was a brutal verbal attack, the worst, you're kicked off the team. Conroy's talent to observe, remember, and recreate made his book a success.
Conroy intertwined his development as a point guard with the development of trust and love between his teammates, his growth as a writer, and his father's brutality to show how enduring pain and sheer determination can lead to success. Basketball was Conroy's outlet for all his suffering, and he creates a memoir that appeals to more than just sports fans. Conroy develops himself as a character in My Losing Season modestly. His ability to find hope while suffering the plebe system at the Citadel, withstanding a perplexing, heartless coach, and suffering the brutality of his father, lets Conroy achieve a character to admire. A character someone would want to read a whole book about and be inspired by his resolution of these demons.
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William (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-05 00:00>
Like millions of Americans, Pat Conroy is my favorite writer. Like all of these Conroy fans, I have read all of his books and always anxiously await his next. "My Losing Season" is in my opinion by far the best Conroy book ever. This book brings all of Pat's remarkable life together in a most unique way through a basketball season. Chapter 30 is the best chapter I have ever read in any book and I am 51 years old. Don't miss this one. |
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1 2 | Total 2 pages 12 items |
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