Nothing that hasn’t been written before, but told with such bluntness and heart that you can’t help but root for Herren to...
Another memoir from a gifted athlete who traded on-court success for a needle in the arm.
The story of Herren, a Massachusetts high-school basketball legend who scored a dream gig with his hometown Boston Celtics, is all-too familiar. With the help of Providence Journal-Bulletin sports columnist Reynolds (Rise of a Dynasty: The ’57 Celtics, the First Banner, and the Dawning of a New America, 2010), Herren offers an unflinching look at a life of wasted potential, submitting his undiagnosed ADD, pressure from family and community and hereditary substance-abuse issues as mitigating factors, but manfully assuming full responsibility for his actions. He shows the frightening ease with which an athlete flush with game and cash can not only live a life of excess, but conceal his addiction from employers, teammates and friends. In painful detail, he recounts one horrific episode after another, from getting kicked off the Boston College team to blowing thousands of dollars a day on painkillers to, high on heroin, passing out on his way to buy donuts for his kids and being resuscitated by police. After burning countless bridges while his professional career sputtered in increasingly obscure foreign outposts, he finally hit rock-bottom in a rehab facility when, deprived of drugs and cut off from his long-suffering wife, the thought of not being able to raise his children gave him the strength to fight his way to sobriety. He rejoined his family, found gainful employment and started a thriving basketball academy and educational-speaking business. Metaphorical hoops junkies may find the paucity of game action disappointing, but Reynolds's work in fleshing out the contextual details and Herren’s self-eviscerating forthrightness make this a worthwhile read.
Nothing that hasn’t been written before, but told with such bluntness and heart that you can’t help but root for Herren to stay clean.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65672-0
Page Count: 286
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
