A straight-edged, readable memoir that will do little to polish cycling’s tarnished reputation.
With action/lifestyle sports broadcaster Hummer, world-class cyclist Hincapie recounts his career spent in the shadow of disgraced champion Lance Armstrong.
It’s tough to determine whether the fairly recent resurgence of popular interest in competitive cycling is due to the racing itself or to the doping controversy that has surrounded it for the past decade. Whatever the case, the now-retired former cycling phenom Hincapie feels compelled to share his story with the world. Unlike prima donnas like Armstrong and Tyler Hamilton, the author’s role in many Tour de France (and other) international cycling victories was mainly one of team-oriented strategy in making sure his team’s star member shined as brightly as possible in every race. Of course, this more secondary role still won Hincapie plenty of accolades, but it also did not prevent him from eventually indulging in the same sort of illegal performance-enhancing drugs that Armstrong and most of the other stars of the sport were using. It’s interesting to note that Hincapie’s depiction of Armstrong rarely acknowledges Armstrong’s nasty competitive side, owing most likely to the fact that Hincapie never seriously challenged Armstrong and so never caught the full wrath of the world’s foremost cycling celebrity. The author is not exactly contrite when it comes to his role in the doping scandals, either: Like Armstrong and other PED users, Hincapie saw doping as an unfortunate but necessary evil. Much like Hamilton’s The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France (2012), this book ultimately serves to tear away the gentlemanly facade of competitive cycling to reveal the sport’s profoundly unromantic underbelly.
A straight-edged, readable memoir that will do little to polish cycling’s tarnished reputation.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-233091-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
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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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