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
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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