A decent meal for sports-loving teenagers looking for role models but a thin soup for adults.
Jesse Owens wasn’t the only black athlete who excelled at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This group portrait honors the others who helped prove Hitler wrong about white superiority in sports.
Eighteen African American athletes—16 men and 2 women—competed at the Berlin Olympics, all overshadowed by Owens’ spectacular victories. Without neglecting the star runner and long jumper, this companion to a 2016 movie celebrates the other black members of the American team, most of whom competed in track and field events. As director Draper and veteran author Thrasher (American Omens: The Coming Fight for Faith: A Novel, 2019, etc.) show, many had overcome towering obstacles, including poverty, segregation, and pressure from black newspapers to boycott the Olympics. Whatever their challenges, the 17 lesser-known athletes stayed focused in Berlin, won 10 medals in addition to Owens’ four golds, and helped lay to rest Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy in sports. The authors describe competitors like 400-meter dash gold medalist Archie Williams in undemanding, present-tense prose well suited to a young adult audience: “Archie knows going back to school is a good thing. He will be bettering himself and not sitting around the house and getting into trouble.” This approach will hearten booksellers and librarians looking for inspiring, easy-to-read sports books for teenagers, but adult readers may be put off by oversimplified characterizations of Hitler and others: “The Nazi leader has no desire to race or compete. His idea of competition is to defeat his enemies or to make sure they can never line up against him in the first place.” Anyone seeking more complex nonfiction about U.S. athletes’ challenges in Berlin will find it in Daniel James Brown’s bestselling The Boys in the Boat or Andrew Maraniss’ recent young adult book Games of Deception.
A decent meal for sports-loving teenagers looking for role models but a thin soup for adults.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6215-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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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