Not quite a KO, but an engaging story of a fighter that wins on points.
It’s not easy being champion, declares Holyfield, who has been heavyweight champ four times and held the undisputed cruiserweight title for years.
He started winning at the age of eight—more than a decade before he first met his father. After Golden Gloves contests, wins at the 1983 Pan American Games and a controversial bronze medal at the 1984 Olympics (he missed out on the gold due to a contested disqualification), “The Real Deal,” as he was dubbed, turned pro as a cruiserweight. Soon he bulked up enough to become one of smallest heavyweights in the business, always going for a knockout, the outcome that can never be argued. He was, and is, a professional, hardworking athlete, savvy and cool in the ring, frequently withstanding punishing pain. Holyfield assigns due credit to his people and blames only himself for losses. He even concedes that his 1999 fight with Lennox Lewis, which ended in a draw, could well have gone to the other guy. Presented with the aid of novelist and sportswriter Gruenfeld (The Street, 2001, etc.), the boxer’s memoir covers his born-again religion, his family, marital and extramarital encounters, childrearing, business practices, money and a misdiagnosed heart defect. The book’s main interest lies in Holyfield’s take on such memorable encounters as the Fan Man Fight, interrupted by a parachutist in the ring, or the Bite Fight, in which he lent a bit of an ear to Iron Mike Tyson. Boxing fans will especially relish his appraisal of such formidable opponents as Riddick Bowe, Larry Holmes, Lennox Lewis and George Foreman as well as Tyson. Holyfield’s ticket to fight in New York has been revoked, with allegedly “diminishing skills” cited as the reason. Now 45, ignoring well-meaning pleas for his retirement, the old Warrior continues to box. It’s his call, he says.
Not quite a KO, but an engaging story of a fighter that wins on points.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3486-0
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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