Respect the man, enjoy his powerful story: got a problem with that? (44 b&w photos throughout; 8 pp. color photos, not...
A lively, pugnacious, and engaging autobiography from biker, boxer, bodyguard, and actor Zito.
Born in 1953, raised in and around New York City, Zito quickly learned to fight aggressively from father Charles, a winning welterweight and sparring partner to Rocky Graziano. Combining boxing and martial arts skills with a quick temper, Chuck developed into an intimidating young man. In his early 20s, he fell in love with motorcycles and founded the New Rochelle Motorcycle Club in suburban New York, where he lived with his (now ex-) wife and their daughter. Aided by perennial coauthor Layden (The Rock Says, not reviewed, etc.), Zito paints a brilliant portrait of club life: its fun, violence, loyalties, and ethics form the backbone of this autobiography. By 1983, Chuck was vice president of the New York City Hells Angels. That association plus his fighting skills got him work as a bouncer at Cafe Central, a popular hangout for celebrities in the early 1980s. He befriended Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, who were biker enthusiasts. Bouncing led to bodyguarding, and Chuck formed enduring friendships with clients Liza Minnelli, Charlie Sheen, and Sean Penn. (He pummeled a former client, Jean-Claude Van Damme, who provoked him in 1998 at a New York night club.) Zito was thriving when the FBI raided the Hells Angels in 1985, alleging that the club manufactured and distributed methamphetamine. In Japan at the time of the bust, he served time in a Tokyo jail and then six years in a variety of federal prisons, even though he was clearly innocent. Fellow Hells Angels members provided support behind bars, but he is blunt about the harshness of prison life. Layden's straightforward prose captures Zito's respectful but inflexible sense of honor, short fuse, and fast hands. All these qualities led to his affecting role on HBO's prison drama Oz.
Respect the man, enjoy his powerful story: got a problem with that? (44 b&w photos throughout; 8 pp. color photos, not seen)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-30124-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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