Students of martial arts, film history, and the 1970s alike will find much to enjoy in Polly’s homage.
Spirited celebration of the life of “the Patron Saint of Kung Fu,” a stalwart of pop culture whose career is due for a revival.
Growing up in Hong Kong, Bruce Lee (1940-1973) wasn’t much of a student. As Polly (Tapped Out: Rear Naked Chokes, the Octagon, and the Last Emperor: An Odyssey in Mixed Martial Arts, 2011, etc.) writes, he was good in English and pretty poor in everything else; he was held back a couple of grades and known as a schoolyard bully—though the kind that “was a gang leader, offering protection to those willing to follow him.” He would go on to battle a string of sadists and miscreants in films that would become standards of early-1970s popular culture. First, however, he had to set up shop as a martial arts master with a burning mission to spread Wing Chun and other forms of Chinese fighting arts to America, always with his own stamp on them, always willing to fight to establish his credentials. “I would like to let everybody know,” Lee announced in 1963, “that any time my Chinatown brothers want to research my Wing Chun, they are welcome to find me at my school in Oakland.” Meaning, Polly speculates, that Lee was willing to take on all of San Francisco's Chinatown and its myriad masters to make his mark. His martyrdom was assured by dying young just before his signature film, Enter the Dragon, entered the market in 1973, but even before then, the charismatic Lee had a huge following. Polly recounts a trip to Goa with Green Hornet star James Coburn in which everyone knew who Lee was, but not Coburn, and later moments in which he outshone even the great Steve McQueen—which is exactly as Lee swore it would be. Enter the Dragon also fulfilled Lee’s other promise: that he would become, as the author writes in rather outdated language, “the first and highest paid Oriental superstar in the United States.”
Students of martial arts, film history, and the 1970s alike will find much to enjoy in Polly’s homage.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8762-9
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
