Short chapters offer an inside, but hardly definitive, look at a very troubled man.
Was Aaron Hernandez a monster, a mystery, or a little of both?
Shortly after signing a contract worth more than $40 million, the NFL star was convicted of the murder of a friend and subsequently acquitted of a dual murder that was alleged to have started with a spilled drink. He then hanged himself in his prison cell. As the author, writing with Athletic contributing writer Anderson, straightforwardly recounts the lives they shared, he recognizes the warning signs that weren’t apparent at the time: the blows to the head and childhood concussions, the stern discipline by their homophobic father, the blackouts that seemed to flip a switch in Aaron’s psyche, their father’s death and their mother’s behavior that tore the family apart, and the unsavory characters who became Aaron’s friends. The murder that landed him in prison came as a shock but not exactly a surprise, though the author never explains a motive or even the nature of the relationship between Aaron and the man he killed. One of the mysteries came to light while Hernandez was in prison: He was gay, he told his mother, and had been since he was forced to perform oral sex on an older boy when he was a child. He had struggled with his sexuality ever since. In his shame, he repressed it and denied it, but it was an essential part of who he was, and he raged against it. Another mystery didn’t reveal itself until after his suicide: Doctors examined his brain and found that, as the result of multiple concussions, “Aaron suffered the most severe case of CTE ever discovered in a person his age…[in] a brain area critical to decision-making, judgment, and cognition.” The diagnosis helped explain the sudden shifts of mood, paranoia, and violent outbursts, some of which had been obvious long before he went to prison. Maybe such impulses could have been contained, or treated, if only someone had recognized the warning signs.
Short chapters offer an inside, but hardly definitive, look at a very troubled man.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-287271-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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