A belated but welcome homage to a boxing legend who died shortly before Tyson’s career took off. Fans of the sweet science...
The boxing champion, infamous for biting and beating, reveals his soft side in this memoir of his longtime mentor and trainer.
Constantine D’Amato (1908-1985), known to the world as Cus, was a tough ex-fighter who developed a style called “peek-a-boo,” in which a boxer guards the face and head from the blows otherwise likely to be rained down upon them. He had a soft side as well; it was D’Amato who discovered Tyson (Undisputed Truth, 2013) in a reform school and trained him, directing Tyson’s aggression into a somewhat more productive venue and giving him the self-confidence he never had: “For the first time in my life someone was telling me that there was no one better than me.” D’Amato, writes Tyson, was obsessed with boxing from childhood on, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the sport and its practitioners made him the man to see for anyone wanting to get into the game. Not surprisingly, that included a lot of shady types, and Tyson is forthright about how mobbed-up the New York boxing world was when he was getting his start, though some fearless trainers and fighters tried to buck the system; of one, he writes, “he seemed like a nice guy—until he got drunk and did things like throw beer bottles at Mafiosi.” Tyson also marvels at D’Amato’s fairness to his fighters, expressed in part by a formula that allowed a boxer to make money even if a promoter didn’t. He writes respectfully and affectionately, though some of the old toughness hangs on. Pondering how many requests he gets for photos, he writes, “back in the ’70s taking any kind of pictures around strangers was a no-no. You didn’t even say ‘Hi’ to people you didn’t know. Motherfucker would start beating on you and leave you in a coma on the street.”
A belated but welcome homage to a boxing legend who died shortly before Tyson’s career took off. Fans of the sweet science will want to have a look.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17703-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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