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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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