A strikingly researched work that’s rich with perspective on Jews in America.
Moving biography of the 1930s boxer who fought his way out of a Jewish ghetto in Chicago to become a World Champion and a genuine World War II hero.
If there is still a queue of writers mining the Depression Era for racehorses or prizefighters with inspirational stories that will resonate with today’s readers, Century (Street Kingdom, 1999) has beaten them to the punch with one Dov Ber “Beryl” Rasofsky (1909–57). Growing up on Chicago’s Maxwell Street, Beryl’s consummate boxing skills and toughness displayed under the ethnically cleansed moniker of Barney Ross made him one of the last heirs to a largely untold tradition of formidable Jewish pugilists. The author effectively weaves the Depression’s neighborhood milieu into Ross’s saga: Irish and Italian immigrants, for instance, boisterously revere their brethren who find glory in the prize ring, but Jews, under the watch of an orthodoxy steeped in nonviolence, remain discreetly conflicted. Nonetheless, when Ross emerged from the Golden Gloves championships to turn pro, promoters knew how to push buttons to hype the fights. The atmosphere in a series of epic championship bouts Ross had in the mid-’30s with Italian-American Tony Canzoneri (lightweight) and Canadian Irishman Jimmy McLarnin (welterweight) was often electric with tribal antipathy, Century observes; while orchestras played his opponents into the ring with tarantellas and jigs (respectively), Ross entered to the strains of My Yiddische Mamme. Booze and cigarettes were among the habits haunting Ross into fame and fortune, but along with the typical indulgent, parasitic entourage, it was compulsive gambling that nailed him. Almost as a purge, he enlisted in the Marines and won a Silver Star for action on Guadalcanal. His last fight, which he eventually won, was against the morphine addiction acquired as a result of treatment for war wounds; he died of cancer at 57.
A strikingly researched work that’s rich with perspective on Jews in America.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-8052-4223-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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