Cordial and courtly: Wilkens’s memoir is no classic, but it’s still of considerable appeal to roundball fans.
A welcome memoir by a pioneer of integrated pro basketball.
Writing with Akron Beacon Journal sports columnist Pluto, Wilkens recounts his long career as a player and coach—one of only two entrants in the Basketball Hall of Fame to be honored for his accomplishments in both roles. The son of an African-American father and Irish-American mother, Wilkens grew up in the 1940s in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, now largely black but then a polyethnic, polyglot neighborhood. “Only later,” he writes, “did I realize how unique this situation was and how it affected my life: I never doubted that people from different races could work with each other and be friends, because I saw it every day of my life while growing up.” Wilkens’s catholicity was put to the test when, after earning an economics degree with distinction, he first went in to the NBA and confronted segregation within and without the arena. His offended sense of justice takes second place in this narrative, however, to straightforward sports memoir, as he relates his episodic education in how the game of basketball can and should be played. Evidently, Wilkens’s keyword is respect, for, despite having had to deal with ego hounds like Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley, he has almost nothing but warmly generous words for his players and colleagues. Still, at many points, especially when considering modern players’ huge salaries (as a rookie he had to work during the off-season as a salesman to make ends meet) and team perks like private first-class jet travel and hotel suites, Wilkens longs for the relatively pure old days, when basketball games “weren’t played in luxurious arenas with corporate boxes with wine and cheese and caviar. . . . They were played in something called an ‘armory,’ an old barn of a building that smelled of stale cigar smoke, spilled beer, and hot dogs on the grill.”
Cordial and courtly: Wilkens’s memoir is no classic, but it’s still of considerable appeal to roundball fans.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87374-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.
Rock-’n’-soul icon Turner is happy at last, and she wants the world to know it.
The love story of the title is specific: The 78-year-old singer has been with her German mate for 33 years, and though bits and pieces of her body have been failing and misbehaving—she recounts a stroke, kidney failure, cancer, and other maladies—her love is going strong. It’s also generalized: Turner, born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, is enchanted by the world, from her childhood countryside to the shores of Lake Zurich, where she has lived nearly half her life. There was another love story, of course, the one that fans will know and lament: her marriage to the drug-addicted, philandering Ike Turner, of whom she writes, pointedly, “at this point in my life, I’ve spent far more time without Ike than with him.” The author emerges from these pages as self-aware and hungry for knowledge and experience. Who knew that she was a dedicated reader of Dante as well as a “favorite aunt” of Keith Richards and a practitioner of Buddhism of such long standing that Ike himself demanded that she lose her shrine? The gossip is light, though she’s clear on the many reasons she broke away from Ike. She’s also forgiving, and as for others in her circle over the years, she calls Mel Gibson “Melvin” because of his “little boy quality,” though she doesn’t approve of certain bad behavior of his. Mostly, her portraits of such figures as David Bowie and Bryan Adams are affectionate, and the secrets she reveals aren’t terribly shocking. Those fishnet stockings and short skirts, she lets slip, were more practical than prurient, the stockings running less easily than nylons and the short skirts “easier for dancing because they left my legs free."
Fans of Aunty Entity and the lady who showed Mick Jagger his best moves will delight in Turner’s lightly spun memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9824-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2018
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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