A gritty, absorbing account of a boxer who couldn’t defeat his own inner demons.
A debut biography focuses on a Venezuelan boxer’s troubled life and times.
Stradley’s book, the first installment of the Hamilcar Noir series, tells the story of champion boxer Edwin Valero. Valero was born in 1981, joined children’s criminal gangs early on, started drinking and doing drugs before hitting puberty, and soon began winning amateur national boxing championships. He made his professional boxing debut in 2002 and rose quickly in the fighting ranks, briefly holding a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest number of first-round knockouts in his super-featherweight division. Along the way, his ferocity and ability in the ring drew comments from expert sports watchers, many of whom are quoted in the work as saying things like “Every now and then in the sport of boxing you see somebody come along and you’ll say, ‘That’s a guy that’s got the goods.’ ” As the author observes, “With a style suited to the professional ranks, and a hunger for fame, Valero could invade these lower weight classes like the Visigoths sacking Rome.” Alongside this portrait of growing fame and professional success, Stradley darkens the picture of Valero’s personal life, in which heavy drug use (and no doubt repeated head trauma) gradually took over and turned the fighter into what the author refers to simply as “a Rorschach test made in blood.” The drug use made him intensely paranoid. He suspected his wife was having an affair, that strangers were cheating him and intending him harm, and that the “police, Venezuelan gangsters,” and even his mother “were conspiring against him.” In 2010, “loaded to the gills” with cocaine, he supposedly killed his wife in a hotel room and later took his own life in custody. Stradley narrates all of this in a clipped, hard-hitting narrative style that makes no excuses and offers no apologies. Boxing fans interested in this minor tragic figure should be captivated.
A gritty, absorbing account of a boxer who couldn’t defeat his own inner demons.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949590-14-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Hamilcar Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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