If you’re wondering why Ali is called “The Greatest,” this unchallenging but pleasant memoir makes for a good place to start.
An affectionate portrait of boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
Shanahan, a medical technology salesman whose job required him to be on hand during some gnarly surgeries, met Ali as a volunteer with a Chicago-area charity that put athletes together with at-risk kids from the city’s “poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods,” not much different from the ones surrounding the boxer’s childhood home in Louisville. He approached Ali in the fall of 1975 to enlist his help, and, somewhat to his surprise, he found Ali both willing to participate and much more affable than his tough exterior might suggest, with “a million closest friends” in the bargain. Not that Ali—as fascinated by Shanahan’s up-close looks into the body as Shanahan was in Ali (“I think he still had a hard time imagining that I started my workday looking into open chest cavities”)—wasn’t plenty tough in the ring, but this account is mostly set in the world outside the arena. Charming moments abound, as when Ali and Shanahan head out for ice cream and encounter a roomful of customers made nervous by the presence of someone so famous, to which Ali responds by waving them over and saying to one young girl, “I am Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world, and now you can tell your children and grandchildren that you and your daddy had ice cream with me at 31 Flavors.” One example of kindness follows another, with pointed contrasts with other famous figures in Ali’s circle—Bill Cosby, for instance, who emerges looking every bit as bad as in recent headlines. One of the finest episodes goes even further, though, and finds Ali behaving as nothing short of a hero, talking a trouble Vietnam veteran out of suicide high atop a Los Angeles building.
If you’re wondering why Ali is called “The Greatest,” this unchallenging but pleasant memoir makes for a good place to start.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0230-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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