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 Holyfield’s ticket to fight in New York has been revoked, with allegedly “diminishing skills” cited as the reason.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 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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