Ruminative analysis of Olympic and NBA superstar Michael Jordan, by bestselling Chicago Tribune columnist Greene (Homecoming, 1988, etc.). This is far from a typical sports-hero bio. On-court heroics and megabucks (Jordan makes up to $128 million annually) play little part; instead, Greene seems to enter Jordan's psyche in a simple, personal way. It begins with their mutual interest in brightening the life of a battered child and the discovery of shared concerns that have nothing to do with sports. Sometimes long-winded and overexplanatory, Greene nevertheless has the gifts of modesty and genuine interest in other people, clearly at work in creating this revealing portrait of what it's like to live with a talent who is reinventing basketball much the way Charlie Parker reinvented the alto saxophone. It's lonely and there's no privacy, says Jordan—your friends are people you met 20 years ago, and the normal activities of getting a haircut or going to the mall for aspirin are gone. ``You can feel the eyes...it's like the eyes are burning into you. It never goes away.'' And it's a fast life, where the skinny showoff rookie of eight years ago is an amusing stranger now, a source of nostalgia to today's thoughtful professional. Greene catches Jordan's respect for old coach Dean Smith; what it was like not making the team back in high school; and Jordan's reaction when Bulls coach Phil Jackson decides not to go to him in the clutch. The author also reveals why Jordan enjoys golf so much, and, in a remarkable scene that speaks worlds, what it was like being in the room with an exhausted Jordan and his sleeping wife when the '92 championship looked as if it were slipping away. Engaging and likely to sell very big, but one caveat: Greene gets close to Jordan but closer to Greene, and spends a little too much time there. (Photos—12 b&w—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-42588-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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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