An idolizing, overlong biography for avid bike-racing fans and speed freaks only.
An admiring biography of race car driver and daredevil Albert Champion (1878-1927).
Champion was unquestionably an innovator in cycling and automotive history. He created and pioneered the internal combustion engine, spark plugs (he's the AC in AC Delco), and inflatable tires for cars and motorcycles, in turn changing and expanding the industry. His childhood curiosity and aptitude for riding a unicycle through the streets of his hometown of Paris stoked his imagination, and The Automobile, a trade publication, wrote that he was "perpetually afire with new ideas and ever reaching for further achievements…versatile, amusing, brilliant, and delightfully companionable.” Champion not only broke records at speed and endurance races throughout France and Germany, including the inaugural Tour de France in 1903, he also earned the title of "the fastest driver in America around a circular track, on two wheels or four" at the turn of the 20th century. Nye (co-author: Peak Performance Under Pressure: How to Achieve Extraordinary Results Under Difficult Circumstances, 2012, etc.) devotes more than half the book to Champion's endurance and speed-racing careers, as well as the history of the sport until the early 1900s. The author also explores bike design but does not provide enough information about Champion's nature or behavior outside the garage or the boardroom. The book is painstakingly detailed and researched, and the infodump eventually has an enervating effect on readers—e.g., Nye tediously lays out Paris' topography and construction of the city, even the individual boulevards ("The neighborhood of Batignolles is shaped like a croissant sitting on the Right Bank of the Seine…”). Champion's numerous achievements are indeed impressive, but in this one-sided account, he's not very intriguing, despite the author's veneration.
An idolizing, overlong biography for avid bike-racing fans and speed freaks only.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1616149642
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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