If you’re wondering why Ali is called “The Greatest,” this unchallenging but pleasant memoir makes for a good place to start.
An affectionate portrait of boxing legend Muhammad Ali.
Shanahan, a medical technology salesman whose job required him to be on hand during some gnarly surgeries, met Ali as a volunteer with a Chicago-area charity that put athletes together with at-risk kids from the city’s “poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods,” not much different from the ones surrounding the boxer’s childhood home in Louisville. He approached Ali in the fall of 1975 to enlist his help, and, somewhat to his surprise, he found Ali both willing to participate and much more affable than his tough exterior might suggest, with “a million closest friends” in the bargain. Not that Ali—as fascinated by Shanahan’s up-close looks into the body as Shanahan was in Ali (“I think he still had a hard time imagining that I started my workday looking into open chest cavities”)—wasn’t plenty tough in the ring, but this account is mostly set in the world outside the arena. Charming moments abound, as when Ali and Shanahan head out for ice cream and encounter a roomful of customers made nervous by the presence of someone so famous, to which Ali responds by waving them over and saying to one young girl, “I am Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight champion of the world, and now you can tell your children and grandchildren that you and your daddy had ice cream with me at 31 Flavors.” One example of kindness follows another, with pointed contrasts with other famous figures in Ali’s circle—Bill Cosby, for instance, who emerges looking every bit as bad as in recent headlines. One of the finest episodes goes even further, though, and finds Ali behaving as nothing short of a hero, talking a trouble Vietnam veteran out of suicide high atop a Los Angeles building.
If you’re wondering why Ali is called “The Greatest,” this unchallenging but pleasant memoir makes for a good place to start.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0230-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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