A compelling story of small-town boxing in Alaska and a complex examination of masculine identities.
Adrift in Alaska, a young man confronts his past and seeks direction by competing in a barroom boxing show in Juneau.
In his second memoir, Coffin (Creative Writing/Univ. of New Hampshire; A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, 2008) interrogates his close but conflicted bond with his father and his mythical ideals of masculinity. The author was a year out of college when he impulsively embarked on a solo kayaking journey from the San Juan Islands in Washington to Sitka, Alaska. There, he landed a job tutoring at a local high school. One evening, he met and sparred with Victor, a local boxing legend and coach. As Victor recognized the author’s innate toughness, he encouraged him to enlist in a boxing event called Roughhouse Friday. Through these physically demanding, adrenaline-soaked matches, under Victor’s expanding influence, Coffin began to unleash a long-suppressed rage, mainly directed toward his father but also against the subtle bigotry he experienced as the child of a white American father and a Thai mother. His father, a military psychologist, left his mother and their two children in Maine while Coffin was still a young boy and started a new family. The author’s anger toward his father, though intently explored, feels somewhat unprocessed; there’s a raw nerve left under the surface that the author may address in future writing. The strength of the narrative derives from Coffin’s vivid and perceptive accounts of the boxing matches and the participants, each with varying boxing abilities and their own individual scores to settle. “Even the most raw, unskilled bouts,” writes the author, “when watched with any empathy at all for the people in them, reveal a tender story about each fighter: what they are made of, who they are, what sadness they carry, what joy….I sometimes found myself leaving the ring feeling numb and dull while, on other occasions, I went back to my corner on the verge of confused tears.”
A compelling story of small-town boxing in Alaska and a complex examination of masculine identities.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-25195-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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