Monninger artfully revives “Two Ton Tony.” You’ll never be able to say you never hoid uh da bum.
A championship match-up between Italian-American boxer Tony Galento and legend Joe Louis is the focus here, but also the lens through which this brisk and entertaining history looks at the state of the nation in the 1930s.
The pride of Orange, NJ, “Two Ton Tony” Galento was never the glamorous sort. Squat, hairy, balding, Galento brawled more than he boxed, sporting a crushing left hook that earned him 56 knockouts in 110 career matches. Heavyweight Galento was also a media darling: Beer, cigars, late nights and large meals formed the bulk of his training regimen. He could yodel like Tarzan, and, when asked how he thought he’d do against an opponent, he answered, “I’ll moida da bum.” His nickname came not from his impressive girth, but from his first regular day job, hauling ice. Joe Louis—elegant and in his prime, already the undisputed champ for two years and successful six-time defender—fought Galento one June night in 1939 at Yankees Stadium. Although Galento lost in the fourth round to the fast-hitting, technically flawless Louis, Galento was “champion of the world for two seconds,” having knocked Louis down in round three. Monninger traces the rise to fame of Galento and Louis, the despair and hope of the nation during the Great Depression and the impact of big money and the media on sports-as-entertainment. Most compelling throughout, however, is Monninger’s presentation of the gluttonous, fun-loving Galento, who rode his two seconds of glory into a follow-up career as a professional wrestler (fighting everything from bears to, once, an octopus) and, more successfully, as a saloon owner.
Monninger artfully revives “Two Ton Tony.” You’ll never be able to say you never hoid uh da bum.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 1-58642-115-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
IN THE NEWS
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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