by Roy Simmons with Damon DiMarco ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2006
Blisteringly honest portrait of a man fencing with his self-destructive instincts.
The former pro footballer’s life story is full of raw vitality that too often found auto-combustive expression—before, during and after his days in the NFL.
As long as he can remember, Simmons declares, he’s had big appetites. As a kid, he could run and play sports all day long, eat through the table and enjoy sex with both boys and girls. By the time he was a star lineman at Georgia Tech (he would go on to play for the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins), he applied the same verve to booze and drugs. He was circumspect about his sexuality (“if you play things cool and don’t rub people’s faces in your shit, they’ll let you get away with just about anything”), but never honest about it: “Roz didn’t care about Sheila and Sheila didn’t know about Roz . . . nobody but nobody knew about Joe, so that was perfect.” The threads of Simmons’s life were woven from strands of deceit and self-delusion. He became addicted to crack, lost his professional football job and everything unraveled. Spending hundreds of dollars on drugs each day was one thing when he was making more than $100,000 a year, something else when he was pulling down $11 an hour as a youth supervisor. Simmons recounts his experiences, which include sexual abuse in his youth, with shuddering candor. He abandoned his child, was in and out of jail for petty crimes committed to support his drug habit and may even have killed a crack dealer who pulled a knife on him: “Maybe the guy walked away from the whole thing…I don’t know.” You can almost hear the sigh as he writes, “You try and you try,” reflecting on the intense grind of sobriety and relapse, over and again.
Blisteringly honest portrait of a man fencing with his self-destructive instincts.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1681-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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