Not much different from the antics that got Mike Tyson pilloried, though Robinson never chewed off an opponent’s ear. Still,...
Admiring biography of the great fighter that neither glosses over nor dwells on his not-always-great behavior outside the ring.
Boyd (editor, The Harlem Reader, 2003, etc.; African-American Sudies/College of New Rochelle) gets help from Sugar Ray Robinson’s son in portraying a complex man with serious problems—problems outweighed only by the sheer mass of his boxing achievements: 85 amateur wins and no losses; 175 professional wins to only 19 defeats, 6 draws, 1 no-decision, 1 no-contest; a career that lasted from 1940 to 1965. The head-shaking wow of these statistics propels the story forward, since Boyd makes no pretense to being anything more than a journeyman boxing writer. Still, he’s an intelligent student of the sweet science and makes all the right noises about Robinson’s artistry, his “fundamental coordinates of speed and power,” his left hook and right cross. Where Boyd excels, however, is in squaring Robinson’s life (1921–89) to his milieu, which for many years was Harlem. During the neighborhood’s most vibrant years of music, literature, entrepreneurialism, and political activism, Robinson moved through Harlem like a force of nature, starting businesses, serving as an example of success on a large scale, living high and bright. He was not a druggie or a boozer, but he was an insatiable womanizer; he was a miserable father, but he gave to charities; he was never bought by the mob, but he required a huge entourage; he beat his opponents mercilessly, and his women as well. (Their son says his abuse caused Robinson’s wife to have five miscarriages.) He bombed in business, failed to support his family, ingloriously tanked in the ring, was a one-stop garnishing center for the IRS. He soared and crashed, Boyd notes, much like his Harlem.
Not much different from the antics that got Mike Tyson pilloried, though Robinson never chewed off an opponent’s ear. Still, icons get special treatment, Boyd makes clear, and geniuses are forgiven their many trespasses. (8-page b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-018876-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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