by Leigh Montville ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 24, 1993
With humor, a touch of pathos, and equal amounts of jock-talk and social history, Sports Illustrated senior writer Montville tells how 7'7'' Manute Bol went from cow-tender in the Sudan to multimillionaire shot-blocker for basketball's Philadelphia 76ers. A spindly giant among giants, Bol has been described as ``the ultimate player from the ultimate ghetto.'' He's also been called ``a liability'' and the worst player in the NBA. A Dinka tribesman from the village of Turalie (recently destroyed in Sudan's civil war), Bol had never heard of basketball prior to 1979. But ``discovered'' by Don Feeley, a journeyman coach looking for a ticket to the big time, Bol found himself in Ohio in 1983, the pet project of Cleveland State coach Kevin Mackey (whose drug problems landed him in jail, while his recruiting violations led to suspension). Illiterate and speaking almost no English, Bol was enrolled at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he played basketball and took photography, racquetball, and pottery (the school was later placed on probation). When his selection in the NBA draft was voided on a technicality, he signed with the Rhode Island Gulls of the fledgling USBL. Teamed with the 5'7'' Spud Webb, Bol, Montville notes, quickly tired of being a sideshow, a ``photo opportunity.'' Finally drafted by the Washington Bullets and later traded to Golden State and then Philadelphia, the much- too-slender backup center (who weighs less than 200 pounds) never developed his offense, averaging fewer than four points per game, and was unable to hold his own ``against...brutes the size of Moses Malone.'' But Bol has led the league in blocked shots, and his mere presence on the court requires adjustments by opposing teams. Montville suggests that Bol's greatest impact on the game may be in opening the door to other Africans. Oddly touching and funny: a captivating look at a unique individual. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 24, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-74928-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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