Keen and compassionate.
Comprehensive, satisfying biography of the self-proclaimed “P.T. Barnum for the modern age.”
Robert Craig Knievel and brother Nick were raised by their paternal grandparents in depression-era Montana. A youthful ladies’ man, “Bobby” carried his inherent charm into high school, where he excelled in sports rather than academics. Fiercely independent, he left school at 16 to enlist in the Army, got married and had a son, yet continued to get into petty local mischief. He doggedly pursued his love of cycling and eventually found a way to make it pay. After jumping over mountain lions, snakes and Mack trucks, Evel (a nickname of debatable origins) kicked his daredevil days into high gear with a jump over the Caesar’s Palace fountains in 1967, which placed the white jump-suited stuntman into a month-long coma. His subsequent Herculean acts of daring, which frequently ended in crashes, were bolstered by his brilliant mastery of self-promotion. In 1974, after seven years of painstaking planning, the 35-year-old Knievel attempted to jump Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, but crash-landed. His judgment was even more impaired when it came to money and women; he spent far more than the millions he’d earned and during his 38-year marriage had relations with more than 2,000 women (at least according to first-time author Barker’s speculations). He spent six months in prison on assault charges and in 1981, pursued by the IRS for tax evasion, vanished for several years. Encouraged by ’70s nostalgia, a hip replacement and a liver transplant, Knievel came out of hiding in his mid-50s long enough to enjoy the media spotlight. Rock operas, roller coasters and bendable action figures notwithstanding, his self-feted “accomplishments” were more than matched by the mess he made of his life. But Barker earnestly provides a sympathetic spin by noting that Knievel’s greatest stunts occurred during a time in American history when people “badly needed a hero and an escape from the depressing events.”
Keen and compassionate.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-54735-6
Page Count: 326
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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