A wonderful book that deserves a wide audience.
The captivating life of the African-American champion who brought grace and style to the boxing ring in the 1940s and ’50s.
Born Walker Smith Jr. in rural Georgia, Sugar Ray Robinson (1921–89) grew up poor in Detroit and Harlem, where he fought his first amateur fights out of a church boxing club and won the New York Daily News’ Golden Gloves tournament in 1939. With his lightning speed and matador moves, the handsome welterweight created a sensation, earning the monikers “Death Ray” and “Sugar Ray,” which stuck. In this insightful, highly readable biography, Washington Post staff writer Haygood (In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., 2003, etc.) chronicles the intriguing life of this gifted boxer and dandy, who toured Jim Crow America in World War II with fellow serviceman, and heavyweight champ, Joe Louis; had a long-running feud with fighter Jake LaMotta; and pursued the savage sport that held “a kind of sacredness” for him until 1965, when he retired with 173 wins, 19 losses and six draws. No one ever knocked him out, notes Haygood. All the while, the jazz-loving Robinson ran a popular Harlem nightspot, zipped around Manhattan in a flamingo-colored Cadillac convertible with his midget chauffer, Chico, and hung with leading African-American artists and entertainers. Haygood weaves in stories of the boxer’s ties with Lena Horne, Langston Hughes, Miles Davis and others who emerged in the postwar years in the singular “convergence of men, music, and style” that was celebrated by Arnold Gingrich in Esquire. Surprisingly, there has never been a Sugar Ray biopic, but Haygood’s narrative is chockfull of movie-ready scenes: Robinson challenging military-base segregation; knocking out Killer Jimmy Doyle, who died 17 hours later; touring with Count Basie in an ill-advised nightclub act; being received like a movie star in Europe. Always enigmatic, Robinson was an absent father, had a volatile marriage, went mysteriously AWOL in World War II and wound up near-broke. Sportswriter Red Smith called him “a brooding genius, a darkly dedicated soul who walks in a lonely majesty, a prophet without honor, an artist whom nobody, but nobody, understands.”
A wonderful book that deserves a wide audience.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4497-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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