An amalgam of entertaining vignettes written in an informal, rambling style.
The veteran Ultimate Fighting Championship announcer shares his life story.
The central portion of Buffer's memoir chronicles his recent knee injury (sustained, ironically, while announcing at a UFC event) and his commitment to making a complete recovery. However, it is his account of life outside of the UFC that provides key insights into the very full personality behind the “Voice of the Octagon.” Growing up in Malibu with a hard-charging father, a former Marine turned novelist, Buffer had an adventure-filled childhood. He achieved financial success working at a series of telemarketing companies and went on to do well in the high-stakes world of competitive poker. After discovering as an adult that boxing announcer Michael Buffer was his long-lost brother, Bruce formed a business partnership with his famous sibling and was involved in the lucrative decision to trademark Michael’s catchphrase, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” Their relationship sparked Bruce’s desire to become an announcer himself for the then-new sport of mixed martial arts, which has gained significant popularity in recent years. Interspersed throughout the book are “Bufferisms” drawn from the lessons he learned on his tumultuous life's journey; they offer inspirational, though often pedantic, words of wisdom about how to achieve success in business and personal relations. Of course, Buffer also includes plenty of behind-the-scenes stories about partying and fighting alongside some of the biggest names in MMA, including BJ Penn, Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Tito Ortiz. Outsized personalities from Hollywood and the world of competitive poker make cameo appearances as well.
An amalgam of entertaining vignettes written in an informal, rambling style.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-95391-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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