Perhaps a little too conveniently, the book makes a split between slick, privileged, cocky “Sugar Ray” and the more insecure...
Not a knockout, but a revealing confession from a champ who was often accused of being a packaged TV commodity.
Leonard was the right fighter at the right time—an Olympic gold medalist, articulate, handsome and personable, at a time when the retirement of Muhammad Ali left boxing hungry for another standard-bearer (and Howard Cosell eager for a new buddy to tout). Yet, little known to the American public, he was also an abuser of cocaine, alcohol and ultimately of his wife. Now clean and sober for four years and happily remarried, he takes full responsibility for his transgressions—“Looking back, I can offer no defense for my conduct. I was wrong”—without absolving the women who threw themselves at him (more beautiful and greedy the more famous he became), the family and friends who put their financial considerations above his health and even trainer Angelo Dundee, whom he inherited from Ali, and who the author plainly believes has claimed more credit than he deserves. Though the thematic arc is that of a redemption story, most of that redemption—remarriage, sobriety, a second family that he treats much better than the first—is crammed into a final chapter or two. The bulk of the autobiography alternates between his exploits in the ring (of which he is justifiably proud) and his weakness away from it, with all the sex, drugs and vacillation between retirement and recommitment. Particularly revelatory is the book’s illumination of the psychology of this most physical sport. It also celebrates the bond between opponents that outsiders can never experience: “For months, the opponent was the enemy, the major obstacle standing in the path of greater earnings and greater fame. Yet, as most of us who fight for a living come to recognize, some sooner than others, the opponent is also a partner on the same journey.”
Perhaps a little too conveniently, the book makes a split between slick, privileged, cocky “Sugar Ray” and the more insecure and vulnerable “Ray Leonard.” Guess who’s still standing at the end?Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02272-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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