An uneven but charmingly eccentric memoir detailing a bassist’s martial arts journey.
A rock musician chronicles his adventures at a taekwondo dojo in Texas.
Blair’s debut book is a whirlwind through his broad range of experiences and eclectic interests. He is primarily known as a bassist for the alternative rock band the Toadies, whom readers may know for their 1994 hit “Possum Kingdom.” But while Blair recounts his escapades with the band on the road throughout the work, the memoir mainly discusses the author’s love of martial arts. After settling with his wife in Amarillo, Texas, Blair decided to get in better shape by picking up a passion from his past: taekwondo. He takes the reader on a tour of the limited dojo offerings throughout the city before settling on a World Taekwondo Federation dojang led by a coach for the U.S. Olympic team. Shortly thereafter, Blair was a white belt in his early 40s, sparring with teenagers far above his skill level, getting regular lessons in humility. The author writes in a wandering, conversational tone that can be digressive and difficult to follow at times. Occasionally, he includes personal critiques of his younger sparring partners that can seem oddly vindictive, but most of the time the narrative voice is amusing despite the excess of superfluous anecdotes. Once Blair settles into his dojang, he takes the reader through his growing obsession with taekwondo. He acquired equipment, trained constantly, and slowly won the respect and friendship of his more experienced peers in his quest to attain a black belt. Along the way, he learned a clichéd but heartwarming lesson about the philosophical value of martial arts: “Knowing kicks and punches is not what keeps us protected. It’s the values and the self-control that allow us to live life and be better people.” In addition to Toadies fans, this account should please readers looking for a lighthearted foray into a strange pocket of American culture: Texan taekwondo.
An uneven but charmingly eccentric memoir detailing a bassist’s martial arts journey.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59439-539-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: YMAA Publication Center
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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