A straightforward account of a life focused on karate.
A debut memoir recounts a man’s ascent through the ranks of karate, from white belt to Hall of Fame black belt.
Born and raised in Miami, the author initially became interested in karate through the films of Bruce Lee. In the early 1980s, after being assaulted by some older boys, the 14-year-old Ferguson decided to learn self-defense and chose karate. Though initially shy and reserved, he grew more confident in his classes, and he began to rise in the ranks, earning his third belt—the green belt—within nine months. The author clearly describes the various tests he had to complete to gain his belts as well as the sense of community that was fostered by his teachers, Hanshi Moises and Sensei Benny Colon. They not only brought their students to compete in tournaments, but also regularly treated them to camping trips or cookouts. Besides acquiring considerable physical skills, Ferguson writes that he also gained another family. After four years of training, he received his black belt, becoming the first to ever reach that rank under Moises and Colon. Ferguson then left Miami after eight years of training, and no matter where he moved—first to Savannah, Georgia; then Jacksonville; and finally back to Miami—he remained involved in the karate community and even opened his own dojo in Savannah. In 2017, after nearly 40 years in the discipline, he was enshrined into the United States Black Belt Hall of Fame. In his book, which features black-and-white photographs of the author and other karate practitioners, Ferguson’s prose is very matter-of-fact and rarely reflective. While his achievements are impressive, readers are not always given much insight into what they meant to the author at the time, and what they signify to him now. The writing is most engaging when Ferguson discusses his mentors and the teachers who have helped him along the way; the compelling passages are filled with reverence and love for this circle. But the author occasionally gets bogged down in terminology and minutiae that will likely leave karate neophytes confused, and the sections about his teaching style lack specific examples.
A straightforward account of a life focused on karate.Pub Date: March 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9481-9
Page Count: 108
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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