Eddy Merckx was the greatest of all time in his sport. Fotheringham has placed him in his proper context and reminds us all...
The life and times of the greatest cyclist ever.
Bicycle racing has fallen on hard times. The recent revelations about Lance Armstrong’s long-standing use of performance-enhancing drugs simply provides the seeming coup de grâce for a sport tainted from top to bottom with juicing athletes. Here, veteran cycling journalist Fotheringham (Put Me Back On My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson, 2007, etc.) provides a welcome reminder that at its best, cycling creates phenomenal athletes with otherworldly endurance, discipline and will. Born in 1945, Eddy Merckx was raised in the suburbs of Brussels. He embraced bicycle racing at a relatively young age. By the time he was in his teens, he revealed clear promise for future stardom; with his parents’ reluctant blessing, he turned professional. Within just a few years, he had climbed to the pinnacle of the sport and had earned the nickname “The Cannibal.” Merckx dominated the sport for a decade, making victory so routine that some fans and journalists came to resent and even hate him, as they believed his overwhelming rate of victory was ruining the sport. Fotheringham is passionate and knowledgeable about his subject, and for fans of the sport, this book will likely stand as the definitive Merckx biography. Newcomers to cycling’s history will learn a great deal but may at times be overwhelmed by the detail and presumed knowledge that the author brings to the narrative.
Eddy Merckx was the greatest of all time in his sport. Fotheringham has placed him in his proper context and reminds us all that world-class athletes are driven by forces that most people can only imagine.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1613747261
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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