Readers uninterested in tennis will find the detailed match coverage tedious, but Arsenault skillfully guides readers to...
A well-informed doorstop biography of Arthur Ashe (1943-1993).
Arsenault (Southern History/Univ. of South Florida, St. Petersburg; The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America, 2009, etc.) uses his vast knowledge of civil rights history to properly situate the pioneering black tennis star within American and world history. Just short of 50, Ashe died from complications related to AIDS, “a disease he acquired from a blood transfusion administered during recovery from heart surgery in 1983.” During his relatively short life, Ashe not only integrated big-time men’s tennis; he also served as a scholar of black history, a civil rights activist, an ethicist, and a diplomat without a portfolio. In the early stages of the massively detailed chronology, the author’s subject can seemingly do no wrong, but as the narrative progresses, Ashe begins to demonstrate his flaws, making decisions that prove unpopular or even counterproductive. One of the thorniest issues involved whether tennis professionals—especially those considered nonwhite—should boycott matches in apartheid-ridden South Africa. Ashe believed that an eternal boycott bordered on a simplistic nonsolution to racism, so he repeatedly sought a visa from the apartheid government. Arsenault chronicles Ashe’s childhood rise from the segregated tennis courts of Richmond, Virginia, to less-discriminatory amateur play in other locales. Despite Ashe’s extremely slight build as a child, he regularly defeated older, stronger players. The author cracks the puzzle of why Ashe became obsessive about starring in a sport usually limited to white country-club players. In fact, rarely has a biographer unearthed so much detail about a subject’s life during childhood and adolescence. One of the most fascinating pieces of the Ashe saga becomes clear as Arsenault narrates the story of how journalist John McPhee focused on the battle between Ashe and a white tennis star for a book that became the classic Levels of the Game (1968).
Readers uninterested in tennis will find the detailed match coverage tedious, but Arsenault skillfully guides readers to match point in a book that will be a go-to resource.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8904-7
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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