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TIGERBELLE

THE WYOMIA TYUS STORY

An inspirational story that deserves to be told.

A half-century after her triumph, a record-setting Olympic champion receives her due.

Tyus, a founding member of the Women’s Sports Foundation, remains largely unknown even among American sports fans. This is partly because of her race and gender, as she came of age during a period when black females were rarely given due credit or offered much opportunity. But it may also be partly because of her personality. She was an unassuming woman from the rural South who didn’t care much about anything but running, rarely called attention to herself, and found herself overshadowed by larger-than-life figures in turbulent times. Her 1968 triumph in the 100-yard dash made her the first athlete to win gold medals in the same event in successive Olympics and followed her surprising, record-breaking win in 1964. However, that feat remains overshadowed by “Olympic protestors Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who shocked the upper echelons of the Olympic world and thrilled activists everywhere by raising their black-gloved fists on the medal stand to protest human rights violations at home and abroad.” Tyus received little notice when she dedicated her subsequent medal in the relays to them, and she felt slighted by the failure to acknowledge what she had done. Yet the author is by no means a complainer; much of the narrative’s charm derives from the author’s down-to-earth nature. Her memoir, written with co-author Terzakis (English and Creative Writing/Cañada Coll.), is also a testimonial to Ed Temple, track coach of the Tennessee State University Tigerbelles, who also served as Tyus’ Olympic coach. He discovered and trained her when she was a small-town teenager with more ability than technique, and he instilled life lessons that went well beyond track and field. Tyus may never have generated the same attention as the more ebullient Wilma Rudolph, but she has lived a life of accomplishment and meaning.

An inspirational story that deserves to be told.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-61775-676-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Edge of Sports/Akashic

Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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