While the fight descriptions are vivid, the subject remains one-dimensional.
A fond recollection of the boxing career of an unlikely heavyweight championship contender.
Terry Daniels burst onto the American sports scene in 1972 when, as a senior at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he fought Joe Frazier for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world. His unlikely rise to prominence—he took up boxing only after a knee injury forced him to give up football—seems like the stuff of Rocky. Daniels’ brother seeks to honor the champ’s legacy, vividly describing his fights but ultimately delivering a hagiography that avoids discussion of the darker aspects of boxing. The book begins by recalling the author’s excitement as an 18-year-old watching Terry fight Frazier—he and his siblings were “thrilled to see this ‘Cinderella’ story for their big brother come to life”—and then goes back in time to Daniels’ childhood in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, when Terry first ventured into the ring. In Texas, the sport “ranked in popularity with football and baseball...and Terry was about to discover a whole new world,” Daniels writes. There were some parental misgivings; their mother asked, “How can you stand to be in such a vicious sport?” But these didn’t stop him from rising quickly through the amateur ranks before turning pro in 1970. A fight with Floyd Patterson is particularly memorable; Terry said afterward, “He had moves I’d never seen.” While the fight scenes often pop with detail—“Terry was eye-level with the floor of the ring and could see small drops of blood that speckled the canvas”—Daniels’ brother largely remains a flat character who shrugs off every setback with a prayer. While the author glosses the physical consequences of fighting, he does reveal in the epilogue that, like many retired boxers, Terry now suffers from dementia, having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age 50, and is in an assisted-living home. Daniels’ takeaway, however, is that “hard work and dedication pays off.”
While the fight descriptions are vivid, the subject remains one-dimensional.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5150-0501-8
Page Count: 420
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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