A moving hagiography that will appeal to fans of Chariots of Fire as well as Unbroken and similar books.
The life of the deeply Christian Olympic champion runner who forsook the glory for missionary work in China. The story was the basis for the award-winning film Chariots of Fire.
British sportswriter Hamilton (Touch Wood: The Autobiography of the 1953 Le Mans Winner, 2014, etc.) re-creates the life of Eric Liddell (1902-1944), the Scottish son of missionaries who sensationally won the gold medal in the 400-meter race at the Summer Olympics in Paris in 1924 before becoming a missionary in China like his father. Liddell was an unlikely sports hero, not physically prepossessing but absolutely determined, and he gained inspiration from German Max Sick’s How to Become a Great Athlete while a student at the University of Edinburgh. At the same time, he became a committed member and minister for the Union Church. Discovered by impresario-coach Tom McKerchar, Liddell soon smartened up as an athlete, winning numerous championship races with his unique head-thrown-back style. The 400-meter race was not his specialty, and he was not a favorite of the British Olympic Association, which “didn’t consider a Scot…as an important figure.” Yet when the Olympic schedule was organized, Liddell refused to race his specialty 100 meters because it was scheduled on a Sunday. Considered a traitor to his country by some, he was soon celebrated as a national hero once he won the 400. In his often poignant but also sometimes overly sentimental narrative, Hamilton emphasizes that this was only the beginning of the Liddell legend, as he sought a higher calling as a missionary, moving to the land of his birth, Tientsin, China, to teach science and sports at the Anglo-Chinese College. With the Japanese invasion, however, the expatriate community became vulnerable to attack and then imprisonment in concentration camps like Weihsien, where Liddell spent 694 days practicing his faith and helping other inmates before dying tragically of an undiagnosed brain tumor.
A moving hagiography that will appeal to fans of Chariots of Fire as well as Unbroken and similar books.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-620-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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