The vitriol wears thin, but sharp writing makes this a worthwhile read for fans who know Cleveland’s pain.
An embittered, lifelong Cleveland fan chronicles the painful departure of LeBron James from the Cavaliers, taking stock of his own life in the process.
Among long-suffering fan bases, Cleveland sports fans can make a legitimate claim to the top spot. With no championships to celebrate since the Browns won the NFL Championship in 1964 (in the pre–Super Bowl era), they have suffered an ignominious procession of near misses and heartbreaking defeats in football, baseball and basketball. When James, perhaps the most physically gifted basketball player ever to grace the hardwood—and a native son from nearby Akron to boot—was drafted by the Cavaliers in 2003, all of that miserable history seemed likely to end. Unfortunately for Esquire writer Raab (Real Hollywood Stories: Inside the Minds of 20 Celebrities, With One A-list Writer, 2008) and his tortured brethren, the next seven years would bring only more pain, with James leading the Cavs to only one NBA Finals appearance, where they came up short. In the summer of 2010, the King took his talents to South Beach, and the author decided to take matters into his own hands, chronicling the now-hated icon’s quest to win a championship with the Miami Heat. Raab hurls intricate helixes of epithet-laden invective at James, though each profane outburst feels less cathartic than it should (the book’s title comes from one such verbal haymaker launched on Twitter). Instead, it’s the author’s blunt evaluation of his own life—including his battles with alcohol, drugs, weight and relationship problems—that resonates as a mirror for Cleveland’s own festering decay and constant struggle. Unlike Cleveland, though, Raab can take solace in the fact that he finally found a good woman and fathered a son, championship victories denied his beloved Cleveland—that, and the fact that James failed in his first attempt to win a championship in Miami.
The vitriol wears thin, but sharp writing makes this a worthwhile read for fans who know Cleveland’s pain.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-206636-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
An informative and brisk biography of a courageous journalist, by the senior US senator from Illinois, a follow-up to Simon's 1964 YA biography (Martyr to Freedom, not reviewed). Himself a former newspaper editor, Simon (Winners and Losers, 1989, etc.) assays the life and career of Elijah Lovejoy. Born in Maine in 1802 and educated at what is today Colby College, Lovejoy decided to seek his fortune in the West. A determined youth despite his supposedly frail constitution, he walked to Missouri when he could afford no other form of transportation. In St. Louis, he worked as a teacher but quickly became dissatisfied with the profession. He bought a half-interest in the St. Louis Times in 1830 and became its editor. At first he opposed the abolitionism of radicals like William Lloyd Garrison, favoring the repatriation of blacks to Africa, but by 1834, two years after he left the Times and eight months after he started a new paper called the Observer, he had decided that ``slavery as it now exists among us, must cease to exist.'' His abolitionist views and rabid anti-Catholicism soon brought him into conflict with slavery-supporting St. Louisans, and the Observer's offices were vandalized and much of the printing equipment destroyed. Lovejoy moved to Illinois, a free state where he thought he would receive a better hearing. His attacks on involuntary servitude encountered the same hostility there, however, since the state had been settled mostly by Southerners. He died in 1837, two days before his 35th birthday, defending his press against a drunken mob. Was he a zealot and a madman, or a visionary and martyr? Or, like John Brown, was he perhaps both at once? Simon attempts to answer these and other questions about a stubborn and courageous man whose story deserves to be more widely known. Enlightening and accessible to any reader interested in the struggle against slavery and for civil liberties.
Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1994
ISBN: 0-8093-1940-3
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Southern Illinois Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
A meager memoir from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Simpson (In the Room We Share, 1991, etc.). Simpson's father, retrospectively cast as a kind of Prospero (the memoir's title alludes to The Tempest), was a highly successful Kingston (Jamaica) lawyer who divorced Simpson's mother, estranged himself from Simpson and his brother, and allowed his new wife effectively to disown them after his death. In the memoir's opening section, Simpson presents an unoriginal reading of Caliban and colonialism in The Tempest, which he proceeds to graft onto his experience of Jamaica's independence movement and his frustrated childhood in an unresponsive family and a beastly Anglophilic boarding school. About his experiences in Jamaica, Utah Beach and the Battle of the Bulge, Columbia University, and a New York publishing house, Simpson has already written at greater length and with more feeling. His latest treatments of these subjects (first published in The Hudson Review) read like dislocated stopgaps, while his essays about his later life as a poet and professor are simply pedestrian. Only one essay, ``The Vigil,'' in the book's closing section, stands out. In it, Simpson delicately balances a description of his uprooted academic routine during his mother's terminal illness with a review of her adventurous life in Russia, Jamaica, New York, and Italy. Concluding with his return to a Jamaica that has not improved with independence—its population exploding and its economy a shambles apart from tourism—Simpson finds a certain redemption in revisiting the dilapidated manor of his childhood home where squatters now live more happily than he did. Though this volume covers a lot of ground, too many of these events have already been chronicled in his essay ``The Other Jamaicans'' (in North of Jamaica, 1972) and his novel Riverside Drive (1962).
Pub Date: Dec. 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-934257-09-4
Page Count: 202
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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