A strikingly researched work that’s rich with perspective on Jews in America.
Moving biography of the 1930s boxer who fought his way out of a Jewish ghetto in Chicago to become a World Champion and a genuine World War II hero.
If there is still a queue of writers mining the Depression Era for racehorses or prizefighters with inspirational stories that will resonate with today’s readers, Century (Street Kingdom, 1999) has beaten them to the punch with one Dov Ber “Beryl” Rasofsky (1909–57). Growing up on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, Beryl’s consummate boxing skills and toughness displayed under the ethnically cleansed moniker of Barney Ross made him one of the last heirs to a largely untold tradition of formidable Jewish pugilists. The author effectively weaves the Depression’s neighborhood milieu into Ross’s saga: Irish and Italian immigrants, for instance, boisterously revere their brethren who find glory in the prize ring, but Jews, under the watch of an orthodoxy steeped in nonviolence, remain discreetly conflicted. Nonetheless, when Ross emerged from the Golden Gloves championships to turn pro, promoters knew how to push buttons to hype the fights. The atmosphere in a series of epic championship bouts Ross had in the mid-’30s with Italian-American Tony Canzoneri (lightweight) and Canadian Irishman Jimmy McLarnin (welterweight) was often electric with tribal antipathy, Century observes; while orchestras played his opponents into the ring with tarantellas and jigs (respectively), Ross entered to the strains of My Yiddische Mamme. Booze and cigarettes were among the habits haunting Ross into fame and fortune, but along with the typical indulgent, parasitic entourage, it was compulsive gambling that nailed him. Almost as a purge, he enlisted in the Marines and won a Silver Star for action on Guadalcanal. His last fight, which he eventually won, was against the morphine addiction acquired as a result of treatment for war wounds; he died of cancer at 57.
A strikingly researched work that’s rich with perspective on Jews in America.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-8052-4223-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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