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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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