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
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 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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