by Davis Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 23, 2015
Hagiographic pieces that never quite coalesce into a book that matches the author’s ambitions.
A journalist’s obsession with his subject is renewed.
As a scrawny runt who suffered bullying, Miller (The Tao of Bruce Lee: A Martial Arts Memoir, 2000, etc.) took inspiration from his idol, Muhammad Ali, to gain the confidence to defend himself, and he maintains that “my admiration for him saved my life.” As a writer, he not only found in Ali his “muse and mentor,” but he also discovered the subject that would continue as his obsession for his professional life: in books, newspaper and magazine articles, as the boxing editor for Sport magazine, and in presentations he would give as someone who had become unusually close to Ali and stayed close during his ongoing battle with Parkinson’s and his spiritual journey. One of his main revelations—voiced twice in the book in exactly the same words—is “how the young Ali’s seemingly endless energy had promised that he would never get old, and how in many ways he is now older than just about everyone his age.” Readers see both sides in descriptions of famous fights and in intimate visits after Ali’s retirement, when he remained more playful and engaged than accounts that would reduce him to his disease might suggest. The author wants to set the record straight about his hero, but he reveals more about himself than about his subject—and about the hero worship that is practically a religion with him, as Ali is depicted as rarely less than a saint and more like a god. “Ali has been the most reliably large planet in my solar system, the astronomical constant,” writes Miller, who recognizes the fortuity of his relationship with the Champ but who insists that Ali treats everyone the same.
Hagiographic pieces that never quite coalesce into a book that matches the author’s ambitions.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63149-115-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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by Davis Miller
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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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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