With fascinating period detail and skillful writing, the author highlights his subject’s considerable appeal and symbolic...
A veteran sports journalist rehearses the story of Joe Gans (1874–1910), who in 1906 won a titanic 42-round boxing match, lasting nearly three hours, against a bruising white boxer.
Gildea (Where the Game Matters Most: A Last Championship Season in Indiana High School Basketball, 1997, etc.), who wrote for the Washington Post for 40 years, begins and ends with the flickering footage of the fight now residing in the Library of Congress. The author devotes more than half of the text to an account of the fight with Oscar “Battling” Nelson in Goldfield, Nev., though he continually cuts away to tell about Gans’ background, his several wives, the era’s virulent racism, other fights and fighters, the history of Goldfield and numerous other asides intended both to provide context and increase suspense. Nelson emerges as a particularly crude specimen, so much so that the huge crowd—virtually all white—rooted enthusiastically for Gans and offered no protests when the referee awarded the victory to Gans because of a low blow; Nelson had been head-butting and committing other fouls throughout. (His gutter racism outside the ring was no improvement.) Whites in the East and South promptly terrorized blacks. The final section deals with Gans' post-fight celebrity and wealth and with his intransigent refusal to retire, even while tuberculosis was ravaging his body. The final scenes—the fading Gans trying to get home from Arizona to die—are moving. Writers Rex Beach and Jack London have cameos, as do other notables, and the author wonders if George Bellows might have used Gans as the model for the black fighter in Both Members of This Club.
With fascinating period detail and skillful writing, the author highlights his subject’s considerable appeal and symbolic significance but speaks a bit too gently about his flaws.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-374-28097-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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