As astute and objective an examination as we’re likely to get of the rise and professional career of basketball and media superstar Michael Jordan. Halberstam (The Children, 1998; The Fifties, 1993; etc.) hits the mark when he connects the phenomenon of Michael Jordan to both the ascendancy of Commissioner David Stern and the birth of ESPN. Jordan left the University of North Carolina in 1984 after his junior year, According to Halberstam, it was Coach Dean Smith’s idea—and decision—that he do so. Famously picked a mere third in the NBA draft behind Hakeem Olajuwon and the forgettable Sam Bowie, Jordan got the huge contract, and Nike had named a shoe after him before he’d played his first game, something that was unheard of. No less a light than Larry Bird expressed awe at the young man’s ability and predicted the greatness to come. While Jordan received plenty of notice, he also served notice in 1996 in a playoff game against the powerhouse Boston Celtics, embarrassing Dennis Johnson, the best defensive guard in the game, by scoring a record 63 points. As Halberstam notes, Jordan quickly became an international superstar, a product, in part, of Stern’s genius in promoting a moribund league into international prominence. It is also significant that ESPN, purchased by ABC in 1984, came of age the same year that Jordan came into the league and Stern became commissioner. The heart of the book is Halberstam’s asides, tangents, and profiles of Coach Smith, Stern, Chicago Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf, and general manager Jerry Krause, and others. His analysis of Phil Jackson’s greatness as a coach and re-creation of the Bulls’ incredible march to six championships are among the highlights. Given only limited access to his subject (he speculates that the ever-competitive Jordan “wanted to save his best stuff for his own book”), Halberstam, one of our premier social commentators, still manages to compose a transcendent sports biography.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-41562-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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