It’s a pleasure to ride in the peloton alongside LeMond, who emerges from this account as America’s once-and-future cycling...
“It’s not the bicycle…it’s the legs”: a sprint through a big swatch of bicycling history, focusing on racer Greg LeMond’s triumphant return from disaster.
Veteran journalist de Visé (Andy and Don: The Making of a Friendship and a Classic American TV Show, 2015, etc.) takes on a big story with that of LeMond, who, in the mid-1970s, came roaring out of a bicycle racing scene that “resembled Grateful Dead concerts, albeit on a smaller stage.” Nicknamed “Lemonster,” the determined young man came along at just the time that the U.S. bicycling scene was emerging from its backwater doldrums, a flowering celebrated in the contemporary film Breaking Away. LeMond famously went on to become the first American to win the storied Tour de France competition in 1986. The following year, while recuperating from an injury, he was accidentally shot while hunting and nearly bled to death, necessitating a long program of recovery. He survived to win twice more, in 1989 and 1990, when he “seemed…more nervous about his chances now than in 1989, when his odds were indeed slim, and more fearful of some mishap than in 1986, when the Tour director himself had fretted for Greg’s safety.” The author, who sometimes writes with the techno-geekery of the bicycle acolyte and sometimes with the breeziness of a practiced sportscaster, makes clear that LeMond accomplished all this largely through sheer determination. His opposite in all this, apart from a few diabolical French opponents, is Lance Armstrong, who “possessed the raw talent to become an elite athlete” but exhibited all the arrogance and weakness of character that would later lead to his expulsion from the sport for doping. In that matter, LeMond, now in his late 50s, has emerged as an advocate for racing reforms that include ending the practice of allowing cyclists to change bikes midrace.
It’s a pleasure to ride in the peloton alongside LeMond, who emerges from this account as America’s once-and-future cycling great.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2794-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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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