Symbolic of Shaq’s career: consistently captivating, but you can’t help but feel he left something on the table.
Ubiquitous NBA superstar O’Neal offers an entertaining, if undeniably self-serving chronicle of his unique career.
The self-styled “Big Aristotle” is unquestionably one of the most dominant players ever to grace the hardwood; he’s also one of the game’s biggest characters. With an assist from veteran basketball writer MacMullan (co-author with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson: When the Game Was Ours, 2010), O’Neal details an impoverished childhood lacking in material things but filled with strong influences, ranging from his grandmother to his stepfather, “Sarge,” a strict disciplinarian who helped curb the young O’Neal’s occasionally wayward tendencies. After a storied college career at LSU, O’Neal moved on to a dominant run in the NBA, from his early career in Orlando to his title-laden days as a Los Angeles Laker to his role as sidekick to young superstar Dwayne Wade in Miami. Despite his gregarious nature and an ever-adoring public (as evidenced by his inexplicable success as a rapper), acrimonious departures from NBA cities became something of a recurring theme throughout O’Neal’s career, circumstances he goes to great lengths to portray in a manner that casts him in the best possible light (PR-savvy veteran that he is, however, he places just enough blame on himself to bolster the veracity of his claims). Shameless self-promotion aside, the “Diesel” has a talent for entertaining, whether he’s suggesting that a jibe from President Obama ruined Celtics’ point guard Rajon Rondo’s jump shot or ruminating on the complicated nature of his relationship with Kobe Bryant. Question his free-throw shooting ability or willingness to absorb his share of responsibility when things go wrong, but it’s hard to question his charisma.
Symbolic of Shaq’s career: consistently captivating, but you can’t help but feel he left something on the table.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0441-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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