A good enough treatment of the phenomenon called “Dr. J” and an especially thoughtful account of the man, Julius Erving.
The NBA’s most transformative player submits an unusually revealing autobiography.
During the 1970s, when officials still bothered to call traveling and palming violations, the high-flying Erving arrived and, nevertheless, managed to do things with a basketball no one had ever seen. For years, basketball’s best-kept secret, “Dr. J” (“more moves than Dr. Carter has liver pills”) played his college ball at low-profile UMass and then for five years with the fledgling ABA, a league with no national TV contract. When the ABA merged with the NBA, Erving signed with the Philadelphia 76ers and played another 11. With Greenfeld’s aid (Triburbia, 2012, etc.), he covers the basketball triumphs, the especially crazy days of the ABA, the All-Star games, the MVP awards and the championships, and he comments throughout on some of his better-known mentors (Bill Russell, Walt Frazier, John Havlicek), teammates (Daryl Dawkins, Moses Malone, Maurice Cheeks) and opponents (Larry Bird, Magic Johnson). Fans will appreciate his surprising takes on players like Pete Maravich, Bernard King and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Erving’s own assessment of the evolution of his game, and his tales of mixing with a black elite that included the likes of Bill Cosby, Arthur Ashe and Miles Davis. They might not expect the attention he devotes to struggle and loss: the premature death of an already absentee father; the spare poverty of his Long Island childhood; the early death of a younger brother to asthma and, later, of an older sister to cancer; the family visits to the Jim Crow South and the adult encounters with the modern civil rights movement; the delinquency of his children and the death of a son; his lifelong struggle with fidelity. Erving’s reverence for rules and order and his simultaneous passion for improvisation have played out in his private life as well, not always to good effect.
A good enough treatment of the phenomenon called “Dr. J” and an especially thoughtful account of the man, Julius Erving.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-218792-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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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