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
A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic.
Whimsical illustrations meet quirky prose in this tag-team reinvention of the iconic 1933 book.
An award-winning New Yorker illustrator, designer, and author, Kalman (Swami on Rye: Max in India, 2018, etc.) takes on the challenge of illustrating Stein’s iconic “auto” biography of her longtime companion Toklas. Even though it’s not as ambitious as Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (2006) or Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures (2011), Kalman’s 70-plus color illustrations, rendered in her distinctive playful and Fauve-esque style, perfectly reflect the artistic and intellectual world of Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. In a short afterword, written in Kalman’s distinctive script, she describes the book as a “love story” about how “two people, joined together, become themselves. They cannot breathe right without each other.” An accompanying illustration shows them sitting together at a table, Stein reading a book (aloud?), Toklas looking on (listening?). On the final page of the book, Stein notes that Toklas probably will not write her autobiography, so “I am going to write it for you….And she did and this is it.” On first meeting Stein, Toklas said there are a “great many things to tell of what was happening then….I must describe what I saw when I came.” With the current volume, we see what Kalman saw. Here’s Stein sitting in a bright yellow chair at her popular Paris home at 27 rue de Fleurus, Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein on the wall behind her. Luminaries came and went, all beautifully captured with Kalman’s bright brush strokes: Toulouse-Lautrec; Seurat, who “caught his fatal cold”; the “extraordinarily brilliant” Guillaume Apollinaire; William James, Stein’s former teacher; Marcel Duchamp (“everybody loved him)”; Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky; James Joyce and Sylvia Beach; Hemingway; the “beautiful” Edith Sitwell; and of course, Toklas, wearing one of her hats with “lovely artificial flowers” on top.
A sparkling, imaginative rendition of a literary classic.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-59420-460-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
