Fans of the Warriors and especially of Curry will enjoy the book, which has its virtues in terms of depth and insight, but...
A hagiographic look at an NBA star with a lot of career ahead of him.
Steph Curry is a bona fide superstar. The point guard for the Golden State Warriors has won two MVP awards and has led his team to consecutive NBA Finals appearances, winning in 2015 and losing in a heartbreaking seven-game series to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2016. He is also largely responsible for the resurrection of the Warriors, who languished near the bottom of the league for years. “Worse than being bad, worse than being onto something and blowing it on the biggest stage, the Warriors were irrelevant,” writes Bay Area News Group sports columnist Thompson. Now, the Warriors are once again at the top of the Western Conference this season, and there is a case to be made that Curry is the greatest three-point shooter in league history. Furthermore, he is charismatic and compelling, with a beautiful family and a great back story: the son of a former NBA star who attended a midmajor school, Davidson, far more well known for academics than for athletics. By all accounts, he is a genuinely good guy. So this book, about one of the NBA’s biggest and most marketable stars, is not surprising. However, this treatment of an athlete with many years to go before retirement feels opportunistic. To be sure, the author is a fine journalist with sound insight into the NBA and especially Curry and the Warriors, a team he has covered for many years, but the book is so laden with praise that at times it reads like an extended press release.
Fans of the Warriors and especially of Curry will enjoy the book, which has its virtues in terms of depth and insight, but the rest can wait until Curry’s career is over for a more fully fleshed and less-adulatory biography.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4783-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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