Jail, deportation, world championship, even a green card: the trajectory of this convict-turned-gentleman can only be...
As if being a professional boxer weren’t hard enough, add the day-to-day worry of being an illegal immigrant and the stigma of being an ex-con.
For Jesus Chavez, born Gabriel Sandoval, life never was a beach. His family came north from Mexico, without the requisite paperwork, and fetched up in Chicago. They were a tight unit, long on values and the work ethic. Gabriel was respectful and a good student, but drawn to the solidarity of gang life. He took part in a robbery and, despite being a youthful first offender, pulled a seven-year sentence. He wouldn’t back away from a fight in jail and spent two years in maximum security. Upon release, he was deported to Mexico. Illegally immigrating again, Gabriel avoided the temptations of Chicago gangs by moving to Austin, Texas. Gravity and fate drew him to a local gym, and a boxer was born. Soon he was rechristened Jesus Chavez, to obscure his identity. Time contributor Pitluk never overplays his narrative hand in telling Sandoval/Chavez’s story. He smoothly charts his subject’s wild, moving ride from jail to youth counselor to multiple world champion in the featherweight, super-feather and lightweight classes. The second half of the book describes Chavez’s work in the ring and the harsh world of boxing. Even as world champion, he had to fight when injured or risk losing his standing. When he did lose, Pitluk draws it in all its unloveliness: one fighter “landed 284 punches all over Chavez’s head.” He battles on, enormously dedicated and charismatic, regaining a title at the expense of his opponent’s life in 2005.
Jail, deportation, world championship, even a green card: the trajectory of this convict-turned-gentleman can only be marveled upon, and Pitluk’s account does Chavez proud.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81454-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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