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 Enter the Dragon also fulfilled Lee’s other promise: that he would become, as the author writes in rather outdated language, “the first and highest paid Oriental superstar in the United States.”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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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