A provocative and refreshingly honest redemption memoir.
A celebrated Olympian recounts how he rose to the top of his sport, crashed, and found redemption.
Swimming became Ervin’s favorite childhood recreational outlet by accident. Later, it became a sport that transformed him into a prisoner of his own athletic gifts. This book, which tells his story through a narrative that interweaves the former gold medalist's memories with commentary by his friend and colleague Markides, reveals the extreme highs and lows that characterized Ervin's remarkable life and career. The “wildfire” son of a half-Jewish mother and African-American father, Ervin’s swimming talent, and personal rebelliousness, manifested early on. Frequently disobedient in school, he set his first swim record at age 10. A diagnosis of Tourette’s syndrome in junior high school made the already wayward Ervin even more difficult to handle. However, it also seemed to offer “cognitive advantage[s] and nervy sensitivity” that made his swimming even more brilliant. His athletic prowess garnered him a place on the University of California’s swim team in the late 1990s and a gold medal in the 50-meter freestyle at the 2000 Olympics. Yet “failure after failure” in everything from personal relationships to school dogged him in the aftermath of his success. Beset by depression and lost to drinking, drug-taking, and other risky behaviors, Ervin auctioned off his gold medal, found temporary respite in Zen and Sufi mysticism, moved to New York, and learned how to play guitar. A job as a swim coach brought him back to the sport. Gradually, Ervin put the pieces of his life back together. He graduated from Berkeley a decade after he started and trained for a berth—which he won—on the 2012 U.S. swim team. The author never flinches at revealing his less-than-perfect past, and the humility he demonstrates at coming to terms with his own egotism and personal shortcomings makes the book frequently compelling.
A provocative and refreshingly honest redemption memoir.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61775-444-9
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Edge of Sports/Akashic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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