Nicely written insider’s compendium on the men, their times and TV’s impact on sports.
Award-winning sports journalist Kindred (Glove Stories, 2002, etc.) captures the spirit of an era in intersecting biographies of two truly irrepressible personalities.
The author, who knew both Ali and Cosell, might be accused of forcing them together here, as each has been the subject of numerous other books, including their own. What common bond, after all, could the offspring of Russian-Jewish immigrants to Brooklyn have with a Kentucky sign-painter’s son 24 years his junior? Kindred quickly answers this question, and dispels any doubts about his project, with a vast barrage of anecdotes, testimonials and riveting summaries of media events that freeze the essential moments as two ambitious careers collide and meld in a decades-long dance of sometimes brilliant and often shameless mutual exploitation. Immediately after their first encounter in the early 1960s, the bombastic doggerel of Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., a 20-year-old Olympic heavyweight champ turned pro, and the sesquipedalian arrogance of Cosell, an apostate attorney dreaming of a media spotlight as the prototypical sports journalist, became an irresistible attraction for a TV nation hungering for “telling it like it is.” With Cosell pushing Clay, soon to rename himself Ali, with intimidating questions about his unorthodox boxing style (“Are you, in fact, afraid of being hit?”), and Clay in turn threatening to snatch off his mock adversary’s obvious toupee on camera, the show boomed along into the big time. When Ali turned Muslim draft-resister, Cosell, almost alone, stayed in his corner. As fans of both remember, and Kindred well documents, the lows inevitably came. For example, a past-his-prime Ali suppressing a medical exam that showed neurologically impaired coordination, only to be pummeled by undefeated champ Larry Holmes. Or Cosell being accosted by frustrated broadcasting partner Al Michaels after downing the better part of a bottle of vodka during a baseball game.
Nicely written insider’s compendium on the men, their times and TV’s impact on sports.Pub Date: March 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6211-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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