A gritty, absorbing account of a boxer who couldn’t defeat his own inner demons.
A debut biography focuses on a Venezuelan boxer’s troubled life and times.
Stradley’s book, the first installment of the Hamilcar Noir series, tells the story of champion boxer Edwin Valero. Valero was born in 1981, joined children’s criminal gangs early on, started drinking and doing drugs before hitting puberty, and soon began winning amateur national boxing championships. He made his professional boxing debut in 2002 and rose quickly in the fighting ranks, briefly holding a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest number of first-round knockouts in his super-featherweight division. Along the way, his ferocity and ability in the ring drew comments from expert sports watchers, many of whom are quoted in the work as saying things like “Every now and then in the sport of boxing you see somebody come along and you’ll say, ‘That’s a guy that’s got the goods.’ ” As the author observes, “With a style suited to the professional ranks, and a hunger for fame, Valero could invade these lower weight classes like the Visigoths sacking Rome.” Alongside this portrait of growing fame and professional success, Stradley darkens the picture of Valero’s personal life, in which heavy drug use (and no doubt repeated head trauma) gradually took over and turned the fighter into what the author refers to simply as “a Rorschach test made in blood.” The drug use made him intensely paranoid. He suspected his wife was having an affair, that strangers were cheating him and intending him harm, and that the “police, Venezuelan gangsters,” and even his mother “were conspiring against him.” In 2010, “loaded to the gills” with cocaine, he supposedly killed his wife in a hotel room and later took his own life in custody. Stradley narrates all of this in a clipped, hard-hitting narrative style that makes no excuses and offers no apologies. Boxing fans interested in this minor tragic figure should be captivated.
A gritty, absorbing account of a boxer who couldn’t defeat his own inner demons.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949590-14-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hamilcar Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 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
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