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
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.
A basketball legend reflects on his life in the game and a life lived in the “nightmare of endlessly repetitive and constant pain, agony, and guilt.”
Walton (Nothing but Net, 1994, etc.) begins this memoir on the floor—literally: “I have been living on the floor for most of the last two and a half years, unable to move.” In 2008, he suffered a catastrophic spinal collapse. “My spine will no longer hold me,” he writes. Thirty-seven orthopedic injuries, stemming from the fact that he had malformed feet, led to an endless string of stress fractures. As he notes, Walton is “the most injured athlete in the history of sports.” Over the years, he had ground his lower extremities “down to dust.” Walton’s memoir is two interwoven stories. The first is about his lifelong love of basketball, the second, his lifelong battle with injuries and pain. He had his first operation when he was 14, for a knee hurt in a basketball game. As he chronicles his distinguished career in the game, from high school to college to the NBA, he punctuates that story with a parallel one that chronicles at each juncture the injuries he suffered and overcame until he could no longer play, eventually turning to a successful broadcasting career (which helped his stuttering problem). Thanks to successful experimental spinal fusion surgery, he’s now pain-free. And then there’s the music he loves, especially the Grateful Dead’s; it accompanies both stories like a soundtrack playing off in the distance. Walton tends to get long-winded at times, but that won’t be news to anyone who watches his broadcasts, and those who have been afflicted with lifelong injuries will find the book uplifting and inspirational. Basketball fans will relish Walton’s acumen and insights into the game as well as his stories about players, coaches (especially John Wooden), and games, all told in Walton’s fervent, witty style.
One of the NBA’s 50 greatest players scores another basket—a deeply personal one.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1686-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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