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 Enter the Dragon also fulfilled Lee’s other promise: that he would become, as the author writes in rather outdated language, “the first and highest paid Oriental superstar in the United States.”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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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