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
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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