Jail, deportation, world championship, even a green card: the trajectory of this convict-turned-gentleman can only be...
As if being a professional boxer weren’t hard enough, add the day-to-day worry of being an illegal immigrant and the stigma of being an ex-con.
For Jesus Chavez, born Gabriel Sandoval, life never was a beach. His family came north from Mexico, without the requisite paperwork, and fetched up in Chicago. They were a tight unit, long on values and the work ethic. Gabriel was respectful and a good student, but drawn to the solidarity of gang life. He took part in a robbery and, despite being a youthful first offender, pulled a seven-year sentence. He wouldn’t back away from a fight in jail and spent two years in maximum security. Upon release, he was deported to Mexico. Illegally immigrating again, Gabriel avoided the temptations of Chicago gangs by moving to Austin, Texas. Gravity and fate drew him to a local gym, and a boxer was born. Soon he was rechristened Jesus Chavez, to obscure his identity. Time contributor Pitluk never overplays his narrative hand in telling Sandoval/Chavez’s story. He smoothly charts his subject’s wild, moving ride from jail to youth counselor to multiple world champion in the featherweight, super-feather and lightweight classes. The second half of the book describes Chavez’s work in the ring and the harsh world of boxing. Even as world champion, he had to fight when injured or risk losing his standing. When he did lose, Pitluk draws it in all its unloveliness: one fighter “landed 284 punches all over Chavez’s head.” He battles on, enormously dedicated and charismatic, regaining a title at the expense of his opponent’s life in 2005.
Jail, deportation, world championship, even a green card: the trajectory of this convict-turned-gentleman can only be marveled upon, and Pitluk’s account does Chavez proud.Pub Date: May 30, 2006
ISBN: 0-306-81454-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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
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