A dramatic, pleasing tale of a sports iconoclast fighting for his rights during tumultuous times.
Fast-paced account of Muhammad Ali’s struggle as a conscientious draft objector, a flashpoint for a tumultuous era.
Prolific sportswriter Montville (Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel: American Showman, Daredevil, and Legend, 2011, etc.) writes in a breezy, colloquial style, but his diligent research allows him to capture both the inimitable Ali and the larger social sweep of the mid-1960s as the heavyweight champion’s stance against being drafted crystallized thorny political and racial issues. “He stumbled into his situation,” writes the author, “said he didn’t want to go to war because of his religion, put one foot in front of another, and came out the other end a hero.” Montville proves that Ali’s grueling odyssey to the Supreme Court, following the loss of his livelihood and nearly his freedom, mirrored mainstream America’s slow embrace of tolerance and turn against the Vietnam War. The author goes beyond the expected celebrity cameos to capture the diverse supporting cast orbiting Ali, from the white Louisville businessmen who originally backed him to a black Philadelphia gangster who gave him a house, as well as the secretive subcultures of boxing and the Nation of Islam. He humanizes Ali by following him through his strange forced retirement, when he became a passionate speaker on college campuses and even starred in a radical theater production on Broadway, as the national mood grew darker. Montville adeptly synthesizes primary sources, from Ali’s verbal jousts with Howard Cosell to his testimony before a segregationist judge, who actually concurred with Ali’s argument on religious grounds but was overruled by the Justice Department. The narrative follows both Ali’s intricate legal appeals and his belated return to competition following the 1970 restoration of his boxing license, culminating in a long-delayed, bitter bout against Joe Frazier: “Every newspaper in America would run a picture of [Ali’s] knockdown.” Ali remains a magnetic figure throughout, but Montville restores his fuller human complexity.
A dramatic, pleasing tale of a sports iconoclast fighting for his rights during tumultuous times.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53605-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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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