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
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
PERSPECTIVES
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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