A nicely developed narrative.
Memoir of the author’s quest for personal growth and wisdom by way of a trip to the birthplace of Zen and kung fu.
Polly confesses to having become obsessed with martial arts at age nine, when he saw an episode of Kung Fu. David Carradine’s character, he writes, “seemed to be as strange and helpless as I felt, and yet he was a total badass.” Leaving hometown Topeka to attend Princeton, he started taking kung fu classes and studying Mandarin. But he still didn’t feel like much of a badass, so in 1992 he headed for the ultimate sleep-away sports camp, the fabled Shaolin Temple Wushu Center in Henan Province in the heart of Communist China. The tall, blue-eyed laowai (foreigner) found Shaolin, established some 1,500 years before, a bit seedy. His Zen masters could curse as well as fight; Polly learned drinking games and dirty jokes along with fighting techniques. Getting whacked upside his head, Bao Mosi (as he was called in Chinese) became tough, dispensing some nasty blows himself. Polly met specialists Master Wu, Coach Big Wang and Monk Dong (don’t ask about his specialty). He ogled beautiful Lotus, one of only five female students, and shook his head over assorted foreign nut cases. Bao Mosi found the combat sports beautiful, “the height of civilization.” His adventure in a Cultural Exchange Mutual Benefit exercise proved that he definitely wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
A nicely developed narrative.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-592-40262-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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