A candid, charged slice of personal history.
A salty, pugnacious memoir of a Little Person, his gangland background, his love of pit bulls and his road back from self-destruction.
Rossi is known to many as a brash-talking TV personality whose mission is to rehabilitate the pit bulls’ woeful image. “The dogs were not designed to kill,” he writes. “They had no special “enzyme” that made them fight. It’s only humans that consciously make the decision to kill. All dogs are capable of violence if they’ve been trained by shitty owners to be nasty, protective, fighting machines.” Rossi has seen the same thing happen with another species—his own. He barely survived his youth at the hands of a violently abusive father, fleeing to his friend’s house in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where by dint of association he became a member of the Bloods gang. He lived on the edge, always ready for something bad to happen: “I learned to protect myself. I carried guns.” This path would earn him 11 years in prison, where he was the only white man housed in a black unit, preferring Blood relations to life with the Aryan Brotherhood. His prison diary is told with a surprising degree of insight, but this is a story of redemption. Eventually Rossi managed to wire his act together, starting a Little People talent agency, working hard as an actor and dance man and working tirelessly to resuscitate the pit bull and bull terrier image. “That’s the most important thing,” he writes. “To give something back, no matter what it is…To actually be considered a success, you gotta give a shit.” Now he has caught a little break, a moment of fame, and he’s using it for the dogs and the Little People.
A candid, charged slice of personal history.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-98588-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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