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HANG TIME

DAYS AND DREAMS WITH MICHAEL JORDAN

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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