by Clive Hiscox ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2017
An earnest story of love for sports and family.
A longtime soccer fan recounts his family’s life and his son’s untimely death.
Debut author Hiscox and his adult son Ben were big fans of the Bristol Rovers, an English soccer team. Ben, a good-natured, 30-year-old man who loved jokes and trips to the pub, played for the amateur Stoke Gifford Football Club, for which he was the top scorer. In his final year, Hiscox writes, Ben dramatically improved his life: he got his own place, found a good job in sales at a safety-equipment company, and had a fiancee and stepdaughter. While on the playing field in March 2015, however, he suffered a head injury. Although he was in a coma when his parents first arrived at the hospital, he later awoke and improved enough to converse and get up from his bed. However, his skull was fractured, and seizures increased the pressure on his brain. Surgery failed to correct the problem, and soon Ben was unable to breathe without a ventilator; doctors asked his parents to consider donating his organs. Three days after being rushed to the hospital, Ben died. Hiscox begins and ends with the story of his son’s accident, but he makes it plain that this memoir is, first and foremost, a tribute to his son’s life. However, the bulk of the narrative reaches further back to tell the story of the larger Hiscox family, starting with the author’s birth as the youngest of seven children; he makes clear that even as a boy, he loved soccer, making scrapbooks of autographs and photographs for every team. Indeed, Hiscox uses the sport as a strong connecting thread throughout the book, showing how it linked father and son. Some of the adulatory prose can be clichéd at times (“He…never spoke ill of anyone or had a bad bone in his body”). But the book also notes that months after his death, Ben was named “footballer of the year” at the Bristol Post Sports Awards. That accolade and this book as a whole are fitting memorials.
An earnest story of love for sports and family.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-8570-7
Page Count: 180
Publisher: XlibrisUK
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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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