Though not terribly propulsive, the text does remind us that the author witnessed some remarkable moments in sport,...
A genial, leisurely, occasionally choppy memoir from the veteran New York Times sports columnist.
Accompanying Berkow’s how-I-became-what-I-am narrative, which begins in boyhood and ends with a touching account of his father’s death in 2002, are anecdotes about characters as diverse as Judge Sirica, Groucho Marx, Muhammad Ali, P.G. Wodehouse, Marianne Moore, Mike Tyson, Tonya Harding and reporter Jayson Blair, whose egregious fabrications at the Times also affected Berkow. (He contends that the paper’s heightened concern about accuracy led to a nine-paragraph Editors’ Note that unfairly targeted minor omissions of attribution in one of his columns.) The author writes with great affection about his remarkable parents, especially his father, who appears throughout as the touchstone Berkow uses to assess his life. It’s been mostly successful, once he began to work hard in college. He began his climb to the pinnacle of his profession in Minnesota, where he covered high-school sports and car races, then moved to Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate (until he became too expensive for them) and finally to the Times and a Pulitzer. Berkow chronicles the dissolution of two marriages with an odd absence of affect, perhaps because relations remain amiable with both former wives. He displays much more emotion in describing his relationship with the legendary Red Smith, whom Berkow first contacted when he was an undergraduate. Berkow also takes a few shots: at Michael Jordan, for lacking moral courage, and at Indiana University’s “iron-fisted and iron-minded” coach Bobby Knight, for lying.
Though not terribly propulsive, the text does remind us that the author witnessed some remarkable moments in sport, including Ali-Frazier I and the 1989 World Series earthquake.Pub Date: April 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-689-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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