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
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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