Mostly entertaining but not a standout. Coulda been a contender, but the author touches too lightly on the hard questions...
FOXSports.com columnist Kriegel (Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, 2007, etc.) tells the story of a Youngstown, Ohio, lightweight boxer whose brief championship reign included a notorious 1982 bout that ended with the death of opponent Duk Koo Kim.
The author begins with that deadly fight and then shows us a Santa Monica restaurant where Mancini regularly hangs out today with David Mamet, actor Ed O’Neill and others. Kriegel’s cinematic style—quick cuts, lots of dialogue, crisp characterization—works well in a story that in its early stages will remind readers of the Rocky films—and why not? Stallone became a friend and produced a TV movie about Mancini’s life. The author sketches some quick scenes of family history (the first arrived at Ellis Island in 1913), the early family struggles, his father’s promising boxing career (terminated by injuries in World War II) and Mancini’s rise in the amateur ranks. Spliced throughout are sad economic portraits of Youngstown, depressing accounts of the prominence of the Mob in the area and some scattered history of televised boxing. Kriegel shows us that Mancini was not a flashy Sugar Ray Leonard but a straight-ahead slug-and-be-slugged fighter who wore his opponents down with ferocity and heavy punches. The cameras and celebrities loved him (Bill Cosby shocked Mancini’s handlers when he gave Mancini advice in his corner during the Kim fight). Kriegel deals in some detail with the death fight, devoting a chapter to Kim’s family (he returns to them at the end). Mancini soon lost his title, tried a couple of comebacks, tried Hollywood, married, had children and divorced.
Mostly entertaining but not a standout. Coulda been a contender, but the author touches too lightly on the hard questions about celebrity, violence and money in America.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8635-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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