Miller’s tough-but-sensitive narrative voice is a force to be reckoned with.
Rough-and-tumble, survival-of-the-fittest memoir from world-class kickboxer Miller.
Miller takes a thoughtful but unsentimental look at his life as a professional fighter trying desperately to overcome a dangerous heart condition, diabetes and a failing marriage. Born in Pittsburgh, Miller’s family life was governed by fear of and loathing for his hyperviolent father, who had been a former NBA player in the league’s fledgling years. His mother played an ambivalent role in his life, and his brother, Colin, was a ne’er-do-well who got involved with drugs and crime and ended up dead of a heroin overdose years later. As an athlete, Miller first tried his luck at baseball in college, but arm injuries and a sense of general disillusionment eventually steered him away from the baseball diamond. To his father's disapproval, he soon explored the more obscure world of kickboxing and martial arts, where he quickly found his calling. However, after compiling an impressive win-loss record, Miller received the diagnosis of an enlarged ventricle in his heart. He underwent major surgery, thus putting his promising fight career on indefinite hold. The author is terse and brutally direct in his descriptions of the seemingly impossible task of recovering from his open-heart surgery and re-entering the ring. His no-holds-barred descriptions of his crumbling marriage and his bouts with alcoholism and financial difficulties, not to mention the deaths of his parents and his brother (all in the same year), don’t always make for comfortable reading. But after all the suffering and hardship, his tale is ultimately inspiring and upbeat. Despite nature’s best efforts to discourage him, Miller eventually made a near-miracle recovery; by 2010, he found himself in Moscow at a major professional tournament, successfully competing in the ring again.
Miller’s tough-but-sensitive narrative voice is a force to be reckoned with.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222234-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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