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
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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