A genial little tome, short on substance but with personality to spare.
The legendary broadcaster on his eventful life and times, assisted by Esquire writer at large Fussman (After Jackie: Pride, Prejudice, and Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes, 2007, etc.).
King (How to Talk to Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere, 2004, etc.) discourses entertainingly on his antic life and storied career, vividly evoking his Brooklyn boyhood and adventures in broadcasting in that familiar, avuncular voice, which is practically audible on the page. He admits to restlessness and a short attention span, evincing a passionate, devil-may-care attitude toward life that precludes deep introspection. In lieu of revealing insights into his character or his talent, King breezily states that he is who he is, and maintains that being true to that immutable “Larryness” is the secret of his immense success. As such, he releases a torrent of well-rehearsed anecdotes, corny jokes, dropped names and baseball trivia. It’s an enjoyable ride through an archetypal American life—the Jewish boy made good, a regular neighborhood guy who rises to the top through sheer gumption and force of personality. The most enjoyable sections concern King’s boisterous, Depression-era Brooklyn exploits with a cast of well-drawn characters, some of whom add their own perspectives to King’s version of events in funny sidebars. The author is unfussily candid about the less savory aspects of his life: the many marriages, his tendency to womanize, his serious health problems, the children he fathered but didn’t raise and the financial indiscretions that led to his high-profile arrest for grand larceny in 1971. King’s thoughts on the many celebrities and world leaders he has interviewed tend toward the trite and familiar, and his defense of his famous lack of preparation for these sit-downs is unconvincing. But it clearly works for him, and his autobiography is vintage King—lightweight but compulsively engaging. The man’s a pro.
A genial little tome, short on substance but with personality to spare.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60286-086-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
