A sturdy contribution to the literature of the sweet science, reminding readers of a bygone era of fighting.
“I will beat Joe Louis and I will beat any fighter I ever fight”: a satisfying biography of the iconic boxer, the only heavyweight champion to retire undefeated.
Born Rocco Marchegiano (1923-1969) to Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, Rocky Marciano wasn’t a pretty fighter. As Stanton (Journalism/Univ. of Connecticut; The Prince of Providence: The True Story of Buddy Cianci, America’s Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds, 2003) writes, he had “short, stubby arms, clumsy feet, and a bulldozer style that opened him up to fierce punishment.” He had a high-pitched voice and a gentle way outside the ring, but within it, he was lethal; his style may have lacked elegance, but he pounded his way through to 49 victories and zero defeats. Marciano also steered clear of the usual temptations of the ring—and of the mobsters that dominated the pro boxing business in those days. The author writes admiringly but not uncritically of Marciano, who, on leaving the sport, traded on his celebrity to snag free meals and hotel rooms and insisted on fat fees for showing up to events until his death in a plane crash. Stanton writes with knowing accuracy of the ins and outs of both boxing and Marciano’s storied career, including the development of what has forever since been known as the “Suzie-Q” punch and his work with Jewish trainers who, having worked the circuit themselves, appreciated Marciano’s ability to take a pounding and emerge the victor. As the author notes, many other fighters have held Marciano up as a model: Floyd Mayweather, a welterweight, waited for his 50th win before retiring undefeated, just to beat Marciano’s 49-win record, and Muhammad Ali reckoned that Marciano was the only fighter from the past who would have given him trouble in the ring. Famously, of course, Sylvester Stallone took big chunks of his screenplay for Rocky from Marciano’s life, which, overall, seems every bit as admirable as Rocky Balboa’s.
A sturdy contribution to the literature of the sweet science, reminding readers of a bygone era of fighting.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-919-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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