Lots of action, a bit of rumination and few regrets in this unremarkable work by a most remarkable athlete.
A legendary hockey star, now 86, reviews his storied and stellar career.
In the acknowledgements, Howe thanks Paul Haavardsrud, a Canadian journalist, “who helped to take the thoughts in my head and put them down on paper,” but only Howe’s name appears on the cover and title page. No assist for Haavardsrud? Regardless, this memoir is fairly conventional, beginning (after an introduction) with his birth in 1928 and proceeding chronologically. (The author appends some celebratory words from his children.) Occasionally, he pauses to comment about various hockey-related issues—hockey violence, the late-career discovery that the Detroit Red Wings (long his hockey home) had lied to him about his salary (they had assured him he was the highest paid player, but he was not), injuries (he had over 300 facial stitches), the sad economic situation in today’s Detroit, and the vast differences in salaries between his day and ours. But the most interesting sections deal with his discovery of the game, his long devotion to it and his many achievements, listed at the end. Howe has kind words for his successors as the premier hockey stars: Bobby Orr (who wrote the somewhat fawning foreword) and Wayne Gretzky, whom Howe met when the Great One was only 11. Howe also writes with great fondness about his family—his parents, his wife, Colleen (who died in 2009), and his children (his two sons were hockey stars in their own rights). He greatly enjoyed his time playing on the same team with his sons and even won the World Hockey Association MVP award in their first year together in Houston. The author intersperses portions of personal letters he sent to and received from family members.
Lots of action, a bit of rumination and few regrets in this unremarkable work by a most remarkable athlete.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399172915
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 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
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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