There’s plenty of chopsocky goodness here, but Chan also reveals a soulful, thoughtful side—just one you wouldn’t want to...
Hong Kong–born Chan (I Am Jackie Chan, 1998), action star and the world’s best-known martial artist, outlines his life story in this (mostly) amiable memoir.
“We can’t beat blockbusters like Black Panther and Wonder Woman, but they can’t beat us when it comes to kung fu films or pure action—and no one, but no one, can top my huge collection of sticking tape!” So proclaims Chan, who is nothing if not competitive, though he’s usually good-humored about it. He was born into the middling rungs of territorial Hong Kong society, his father a martial artist who worked as a chef in a consulate, which landed Chan in a school among rich kids. Chan soon learned to defend himself with his fists, which led him to a school that blended martial arts and acting—just the recipe for the career he carved out for himself, landing his first starring role not long after Bruce Lee’s death in a movie called New Fist of Fury, “a major work that would herald the arrival of a new kung fu star,” as Chan was promised. He worked his way from contract player to star, always with an eye on the bigger prize of Hollywood. On that note, the memoir begins with his being awarded a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2016. “After fifty-six years, making over two hundred films, and breaking many bones, I never thought I’d win one,” he allows, before adding that he wouldn’t mind winning another for a film in which he starred or directed. The book is definitively warts (and cracked skulls and broken bones and gallons of blood) and all: The author confesses to all kinds of bad behavior, though he writes that his greatest regret is not having been a better student. He warmly praises friends and colleagues such as Michelle Yeoh (“not many people can match me in my willingness to go for it”), Chris Tucker, and Sylvester Stallone.
There’s plenty of chopsocky goodness here, but Chan also reveals a soulful, thoughtful side—just one you wouldn’t want to mess with.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982107-21-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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