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Ironman |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
 Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060598409 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Crutcher reassembles some of the character types he used to riveting effect in his stellar Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes: a teenage misfit narrator enduring grueling athletic training; a tough heroine with a tragic past; a right-wing authoritarian heavy; enlightened teachers; and a sadistic father. At its best, the narrative crackles along in the author's inimitable style. Beauregard Brewster, a would-be Ironman triathlete, chronicles the events that ensue after he insults an oppressive teacher and is forced to take an anger-management class with other troubled students. But Crutcher's message sometimes overwhelms the cast and the story line. Beau's stern father, who has to be right at all costs-even if it means stacking the deck against his son-is one of the few fully fleshed-out characters. Many are either... |
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Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060094893 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Such superlatives as "riveting" and "powerful" can only hint at the craftsmanship on display in this transcendent story of love, loyalty and courage. While probing such issues as friendship, free speech and moral values, Crutcher ( Chinese Handcuffs ; Stotan! ) tells a tale whose mordant humor, poignancy and suspense pack a breathtaking wallop. A social outcast in junior high due to his excessive weight, narrator Eric Calhoune found a kindred spirit in Sarah Byrnes, whose face and hands were hideously disfigured in a childhood accident. Now a senior and considerably slimmed down through competitive swimming (though still aptly called "Moby"), Eric remains fiercely devoted to his friend, whose caustic tongue is her only protection from life's inequities. When Sarah abruptly stops talking and is committed to a... |
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Whale Talk |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0440229383 |
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| Availability: |
Usually ships within 24 hours. |
Book Review
T. J. Jones is black, Japanese, and white; his given name is The Tao (honest!), and he's the son of a woman who abandoned him when she got heavily into crack and crank. As a child he was full of rage, but now as a senior in high school he's pretty much overcome all that. With the help of a good therapist and his decent, loving, ex-hippie adoptive parents, he's not only fairly even-keeled, he has turned out to be smart and funny. Injustice, however, still fills him with fury. So when big-deal football star Mike Barbour bullies brain-damaged Chris Coughlin for wearing his dead brother's letter jacket, T.J. hatches a scheme for revenge. He assembles a swim team (in a school with no pool) made up of the most outrageous outsiders and misfits he can find and extracts a conditional promise of those sacred letter... |
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Athletic Shorts: Six Short Stories |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060507837 |
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| Availability: |
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From Publishers Weekly
If the stereotype of the "bonehead jock" is ever to be defeated, it will be at Crutcher's hands. In these six short stories, he and his athlete protagonists take on such weighty issues as racism, homophobia, sexism and the teenager's essential task of coming to terms with his parents. At the same time the author makes the world of sports compelling enough to engage even the most sedentary readers. Three of the stories revolve around characters featured in Crutcher's The Crazy Horse Electric Game , including the memorable eccentric known as Telephone Man. Also starring in his own story is Lionel Serbousek, the orphaned artist and swimmer of Stotan! In the book's final tale, Louie Banks (from Running Loose ) is befriended by a young man with AIDS and must cope once again with the untimely death of a loved one. The... |
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King of the Mild Frontier |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060502517 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up-For those who want to know the real poop behind this popular author's characters (and, to some extent, his character), this is the book you've been waiting for. The cover photo tells it all: a white picket fence in the background, for all the world as straight and orderly and stereotypically 1950s proper as the author's maddeningly rational father, "Crutch," wanted things to appear. But looming in the foreground is toothy, smiling Chris, the short-fused emotional time bomb who regularly exploded into anger and tears. Protective of his alcoholic mom and at almost constant odds with his strict and demanding dad, Crutcher describes incidents and telling episodes from his formative years. His signature wit was sharpened in response to both his feelings of inadequacy and his competitive nature, honed... |
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The Crazy Horse Electric Game |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060094907 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 3-4 days. |
From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up The title refers to the game for the Eastern Montana American Legion baseball championship, as the star pitcher, Willie Weaver, leads his team against the powerful squad from Crazy Horse Electric. But the emphasis of the novel shifts quickly away from baseball after Willie suffers a head injury in a water skiing accident. Unable to accept the loss of his athletic prowess, the pity of others, and his parents' troubled marriage, Willie runs away and ends up in the inner city of Oakland, California. After being beaten and robbed by a gang, Willie is rescued by a black bus driver/pimp, who enrolls Willie in a school for troubled youths. Thanks to the understanding staff of the school, Willie regains his mental and physical abilities and his self-confidence. He returns home to Montana, however, to... |
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Running Loose |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060094915 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
In this first novel, a boy's senior year in high school goes awry when he's kicked off the football team for taking a stand against the coach, and his girlfriend is killed in a car accident. PW found this "a tightly plotted, compelling talecompassionate, funny and sensitive." Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
School Library Journal
"The book raises important issues for adolescents to consider."
See all Editorial Reviews
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Stotan! |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060094923 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
To be a Stotan (a cross between a Stoic and a Spartan) is to push one's physical and emotional capabilities beyond the limit, as four high school swimmers find out when they accept the challenge of a week-long endurance test devised by their coach. Though it is swim team captain Walker Dupree who narrates, this is every bit as much an ensemble novel as it is four individual stories. Each young man pursues a personal goal, but together the team pursues demons outside the group, ranging from an "anonymous" neo-Nazi association distributing offensive newspapers to the abusive father of one of the boys, who drives his son to suicide. But a demon bigger than any individual or group effort comes along when illness strikes one of these Stotan young men. Then the team finds out that you can't always make sense of... |
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Whale Talk |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0060293691 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
Book Review
T. J. Jones is black, Japanese, and white; his given name is The Tao (honest!), and he's the son of a woman who abandoned him when she got heavily into crack and crank. As a child he was full of rage, but now as a senior in high school he's pretty much overcome all that. With the help of a good therapist and his decent, loving, ex-hippie adoptive parents, he's not only fairly even-keeled, he has turned out to be smart and funny. Injustice, however, still fills him with fury. So when big-deal football star Mike Barbour bullies brain-damaged Chris Coughlin for wearing his dead brother's letter jacket, T.J. hatches a scheme for revenge. He assembles a swim team (in a school with no pool) made up of the most outrageous outsiders and misfits he can find and extracts a conditional promise of those sacred letter... |
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The Sledding Hill |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0060502436 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 3-4 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Crutcher takes the fad in authorial intrusion one better, inserting himself as a character in this metafictional novel with a heavy-handed message, a schizophrenic presentation and a highly entertaining plot. Eddie Proffit is the very definition of a sympathetic character, losing his Dad and best friend to violent accidents in the opening pages. His story is narrated in Lovely Bones-esque fashion by the dead friend, Billy, who, if not in Heaven, is in a very good place—free of pain and full of neat tricks to employ during his ghostly mission to help Eddie overcome sadness so deep he has stopped speaking. The exploration of death and of being silenced by grief takes a hairpin turn when book banning—a very different type of silencing—becomes the focus of the novel's second half. Eddie's elective... |
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The Sledding Hill |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Hardcover |
| ISBN: |
0060502444 |
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| Availability: |
Ships within 2-3 days. |
From Publishers Weekly
Crutcher takes the fad in authorial intrusion one better, inserting himself as a character in this metafictional novel with a heavy-handed message, a schizophrenic presentation and a highly entertaining plot. Eddie Proffit is the very definition of a sympathetic character, losing his Dad and best friend to violent accidents in the opening pages. His story is narrated in Lovely Bones-esque fashion by the dead friend, Billy, who, if not in Heaven, is in a very good place—free of pain and full of neat tricks to employ during his ghostly mission to help Eddie overcome sadness so deep he has stopped speaking. The exploration of death and of being silenced by grief takes a hairpin turn when book banning—a very different type of silencing—becomes the focus of the novel's second half. Eddie's elective... |
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Chinese Handcuffs |
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| Author: |
Chris Crutcher |
Book Review
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| Format: |
Paperback |
| ISBN: |
0060598395 |
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| Availability: |
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From School Library Journal
Grade 9-12-- There are enough plots here to fuel a soap opera for a year. Dillon Hemingway is a brilliant student and athlete whose older brother, Preston, gets involved with a motorcycle gang, loses his legs in a bike accident, and later blows his head away in full view of his younger brother. Dillon writes long letters to his dead brother to tell him about Stacy, who was Preston's girl and the mother of their child but who may secretly love Dillon, and Jennifer, star basketball player, whose father sexually abused her and whose stepfather, a madman, also abuses her. Dillon's mother walked out on his family some years before. So much for the beginning. Beyond the first chapters there are scenes in which Dillon sprinkles his brother's ashes into the gas tanks of the cyclists who corrupted Preston and in... |
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