by Jimmy Connors ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2013
It could have benefited from the self-reflection of an R.A. Dickey, but a readable autobiography all the same.
Four decades after his heyday, the controversial tennis star serves up a suitably cocky autobiography.
It doesn’t take Connors long—three pages, in fact—to get to the word “arrogant,” which might have been coined to describe him. He delivers numerous reasons for why he might have been overweeningly proud, including the fact that he rose from a not-so-nice childhood in not-so-nice East St. Louis to become one of the most lauded players of the day. Repeatedly, however, he tells us that he has OCD (“Yup. I have it. Didn’t know that, did you?”), which, if not entirely effective as an excuse for some of his bad behavior—including, as he later admits, a gambling addiction—at least explains some of it. If readers soon get the feeling that Connors wouldn’t be the ideal choice of seatmate on a long plane ride, the better parts of his book describe not his prideful unpleasantness, but the business of tennis, from the importance of early coaching (in his case, by both his mother and grandmother) to the deep rivalries that exist among champions. One whom Connors says didn’t like him one bit was Arthur Ashe, who had good reason, since Connors once painted Romanian tennis star Ilie Nastase in blackface before a doubles game with Ashe. (“We weren’t all that bright back then, to say the least,” he writes.) Connors is chatty, gossipy—Nastase thoroughly disliked German player Hans-Jürgen Pohmann, he writes, and even called him a Nazi after a match—insightful and often, yes, arrogant, which makes this book a solid match of object and subject.
It could have benefited from the self-reflection of an R.A. Dickey, but a readable autobiography all the same.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-124299-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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PROFILES
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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