Nothing that hasn’t been written before, but told with such bluntness and heart that you can’t help but root for Herren to...
Another memoir from a gifted athlete who traded on-court success for a needle in the arm.
The story of Herren, a Massachusetts high-school basketball legend who scored a dream gig with his hometown Boston Celtics, is all-too familiar. With the help of Providence Journal-Bulletin sports columnist Reynolds (Rise of a Dynasty: The ’57 Celtics, the First Banner, and the Dawning of a New America, 2010), Herren offers an unflinching look at a life of wasted potential, submitting his undiagnosed ADD, pressure from family and community and hereditary substance-abuse issues as mitigating factors, but manfully assuming full responsibility for his actions. He shows the frightening ease with which an athlete flush with game and cash can not only live a life of excess, but conceal his addiction from employers, teammates and friends. In painful detail, he recounts one horrific episode after another, from getting kicked off the Boston College team to blowing thousands of dollars a day on painkillers to, high on heroin, passing out on his way to buy donuts for his kids and being resuscitated by police. After burning countless bridges while his professional career sputtered in increasingly obscure foreign outposts, he finally hit rock-bottom in a rehab facility when, deprived of drugs and cut off from his long-suffering wife, the thought of not being able to raise his children gave him the strength to fight his way to sobriety. He rejoined his family, found gainful employment and started a thriving basketball academy and educational-speaking business. Metaphorical hoops junkies may find the paucity of game action disappointing, but Reynolds's work in fleshing out the contextual details and Herren’s self-eviscerating forthrightness make this a worthwhile read.
Nothing that hasn’t been written before, but told with such bluntness and heart that you can’t help but root for Herren to stay clean.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-65672-0
Page Count: 286
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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