Not only an insightful biography, but a shining history of the early NBA as well.
Voluble, basketball-savvy tour of Boston Celtic great Bob Cousy’s life, from Providence Journal sportswriter Reynolds (Glory Days, 1998, etc.).
The author wisely starts at the close of his subject’s career, in 1963, when basketball was on the cusp of becoming one of the nation’s pastimes. Cousy retired when he was still hot, no rust gathering about the joints, his name golden (and all the better to make a living from). He was recognized as the first flash playmaker, with his no-look passes and behind-the-back work, the man who essentially made the National Basketball Association, playing be-bop at point guard all through the 1950s, imaginative and confident on the court. But Cousy was also driven by his insecurities, Reynolds writes, knowing full well what was on the magician’s mind after interviewing him at length for this book. He was terrified that his game would desert him and he would find himself naked and humiliated under the lights. Cousy was the captain of a team that understood it worked better as a collective than individuals; his role was to make his teammates play better, and a great pass was the game’s ultimately expression. Reynolds explores with obvious pleasure the evolution of professional basketball, in particular the ascendancy of black players like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain in the heretofore white sport, the shrewd coaching of Red Auerbach, and the innovations that the Celtics brought to the game. After Cousy gave up playing to coach Boston College, his friendship with a pair of known gamblers prompted accusations that he was on the Mob’s take, but the author appears to believe his denials. Henderson does beautiful job of painting Cousy, right down to his French lisp; he comes across as a team player who truly believes it when he says it was the team, his nonpareil huddle of Heinsohn and Jones and Jones and Russell, who made the difference.
Not only an insightful biography, but a shining history of the early NBA as well.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5476-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a...
An inspired, beautiful and absorbing account of a woman battling grief—with a goshawk.
Following the sudden death of her father, Macdonald (History and Philosophy/Cambridge Univ.; Falcon, 2006, etc.) tried staving off deep depression with a unique form of personal therapy: the purchase and training of an English goshawk, which she named Mabel. Although a trained falconer, the author chose a raptor both unfamiliar and unpredictable, a creature of mad confidence that became a means of working against madness. “The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life,” she writes. As a devotee of birds of prey since girlhood, Macdonald knew the legends and the literature, particularly the cautionary example of The Once and Future King author T.H. White, whose 1951 book The Goshawk details his own painful battle to master his title subject. Macdonald dramatically parallels her own story with White’s, achieving a remarkable imaginative sympathy with the writer, a lonely, tormented homosexual fighting his own sadomasochistic demons. Even as she was learning from White’s mistakes, she found herself very much in his shoes, watching her life fall apart as the painfully slow bonding process with Mabel took over. Just how much do animals and humans have in common? The more Macdonald got to know her, the more Mabel confounded her notions about what the species was supposed to represent. Is a hawk a symbol of might or independence, or is that just our attempt to remake the animal world in our own image? Writing with breathless urgency that only rarely skirts the melodramatic, Macdonald broadens her scope well beyond herself to focus on the antagonism between people and the environment.
Whether you call this a personal story or nature writing, it’s poignant, thoughtful and moving—and likely to become a classic in either genre.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0802123411
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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