This is bound to be the best biography of Kobe Bryant for some time, even if at times it may be overkill.
A mammoth biography of one of basketball’s most complicated stars.
How readers respond to Lazenby’s (Michael Jordan: The Life, 2014, etc.) new tome will depend in no small part on how they feel about the Los Angeles Lakers’ mercurial Kobe Bryant and whether or not they buy into the idea that the recently retired superstar warrants a biography of more than 600 pages. There is no doubt that Bryant helped carry the NBA into the post–Michael Jordan era, but he was also difficult, hypercompetitive, and inclined toward self-aggrandizement—“showboat” was a nickname bestowed on him by teammates early in his career. Bryant alienated many of the people in his life, from teammates, whether little-used benchwarmers or future Hall of Famers, to family—he ended up estranged from even those who had been closest to him, including his parents (his father was a former NBA and Italian league player). Allegations of a sexual assault of a Colorado hotel worker in 2003 made him more toxic to some, even after authorities dropped the case when the alleged victim refused to testify. As he did with Michael Jordan and Jerry West, Lazenby tells Bryant’s story well, and he has a firm grip on the history and culture of the NBA. However, the question remains as to whether Bryant warrants this much space so soon after his 2016 retirement; it is likely too soon for the necessary critical distance in assessing his life and its significance in the history of the NBA. Customarily, such lengthy sports biographies require the subject to transcend sports, and Lazenby does not make a convincing enough case that Bryant does so. Still, the future Hall of Famer’s life is interesting, and much of the narrative is unquestionably compelling.
This is bound to be the best biography of Kobe Bryant for some time, even if at times it may be overkill.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38724-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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