Boxing fans should enjoy the author’s close encounters with the likes of Tyson, Toney, and De La Hoya.
A sportswriter takes a deep dive into the “brutal but strangely beautiful world” of boxing.
McRae (A Man’s World, 2015, etc.) was smitten with boxing as a youngster in his native South Africa when he saw a newsreel that showed Muhammad Ali “destroying Cleveland Williams” in a 1966 fight “with a speed that made the savagery look lustrous on monochrome film.” As a sportswriter, he got to indulge his obsession up close, attending matches and interviewing fighters while traveling across the U.S. for five years. At least for fans of the sport, his illuminating book exploring this fierce world may rival the works of such famed boxing writers as Bert Sugar, Norman Mailer, and A.J. Liebling. The athletes McRae has followed, he writes, “are all men who have dreamed that they might one day be as great as...Muhammad Ali.” The author skillfully describes his boxing-related adventures of the 1990s in 15 action-packed chapters, devoting particular attention to such legendary fighters as Mike Tyson, James Toney, and Oscar De La Hoya. Much about Tyson exudes menace—in their first encounter, McRae recalls, he “moved toward me, reminding me of a giant hammerhead swerving in for the kill.” But the author deftly finds the pathos of the former heavyweight champion, noting that “his whole life had been chiseled from themes of loss and deceit.” De La Hoya appeared to be cut from a wholesome cloth but “beneath the glitter, it was easy to sense the strain. His rich stardom was muddied by loss and distrust.” At the heart of this engaging and eloquent work, though, is McRae and his intriguing attempts to explain his “seemingly illogical but enduring love” of boxing. An 11th-round knockout punch that turned “defeat into stunning victory” has a strong effect on him: “When else as an adult, if not in sex or sleep, had I been so beyond the mundane?” The serious, and even fatal, brain injuries suffered by boxers in the ring give him reason to pause, but “for those of us still lost in the maze, there is always another fighter to follow. A new version of an ancient story is always waiting to be told.”
Boxing fans should enjoy the author’s close encounters with the likes of Tyson, Toney, and De La Hoya.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949590-05-0
Page Count: 537
Publisher: Hamilcar Publications
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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