Boxing fans should enjoy the author’s close encounters with the likes of Tyson, Toney, and De La Hoya.
A sportswriter takes a deep dive into the “brutal but strangely beautiful world” of boxing.
McRae (A Man’s World, 2015, etc.) was smitten with boxing as a youngster in his native South Africa when he saw a newsreel that showed Muhammad Ali “destroying Cleveland Williams” in a 1966 fight “with a speed that made the savagery look lustrous on monochrome film.” As a sportswriter, he got to indulge his obsession up close, attending matches and interviewing fighters while traveling across the U.S. for five years. At least for fans of the sport, his illuminating book exploring this fierce world may rival the works of such famed boxing writers as Bert Sugar, Norman Mailer, and A.J. Liebling. The athletes McRae has followed, he writes, “are all men who have dreamed that they might one day be as great as...Muhammad Ali.” The author skillfully describes his boxing-related adventures of the 1990s in 15 action-packed chapters, devoting particular attention to such legendary fighters as Mike Tyson, James Toney, and Oscar De La Hoya. Much about Tyson exudes menace—in their first encounter, McRae recalls, he “moved toward me, reminding me of a giant hammerhead swerving in for the kill.” But the author deftly finds the pathos of the former heavyweight champion, noting that “his whole life had been chiseled from themes of loss and deceit.” De La Hoya appeared to be cut from a wholesome cloth but “beneath the glitter, it was easy to sense the strain. His rich stardom was muddied by loss and distrust.” At the heart of this engaging and eloquent work, though, is McRae and his intriguing attempts to explain his “seemingly illogical but enduring love” of boxing. An 11th-round knockout punch that turned “defeat into stunning victory” has a strong effect on him: “When else as an adult, if not in sex or sleep, had I been so beyond the mundane?” The serious, and even fatal, brain injuries suffered by boxers in the ring give him reason to pause, but “for those of us still lost in the maze, there is always another fighter to follow. A new version of an ancient story is always waiting to be told.”
Boxing fans should enjoy the author’s close encounters with the likes of Tyson, Toney, and De La Hoya.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-949590-05-0
Page Count: 537
Publisher: Hamilcar Publications
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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