An inspirational account that delivers some valuable taekwondo advice.
Part memoir, part self-help book, this debut work chronicles how taekwondo gave a musician the tools he needed to restart his life after a major failure.
In 1996, Davidson and his wife, Carole, declared bankruptcy. He had been trying to support his family as a musician, but couldn’t make ends meet. The couple had three children to care for and not many options. The author began to study taekwondo at the suggestion of a friend. It was a good way for him to work out his frustrations at first. He had no interest in learning to fight. Not long into his initial training, he discovered what the martial art could do for him in terms of discipline, spirituality, and mental health. It forced him to set goals and gave him the motivation to achieve them, and the ability to respect and learn from mistakes. Getting into the training a bit further, he found he wanted to open his own school. He did this in fairly short order, which compelled him to learn how to run a business. The discipline he learned kept him anchored during tough times, when he was delivering newspapers to bring in an income and when his wife left him. And it led him to his greatest successes, becoming a taekwondo master and providing stability for his loved ones. Davidson got a lot of coaching along the way, whether it was from his taekwondo instructors, biographies of great leaders, or business books, and he offers this useful information to readers. He analyzes each step of his life in clean, clear prose; includes photos; and presents bullet points in hopes of helping people to change their own lives for the better. But there are some technical passages concerning the complex process of becoming a taekwondo master that many readers may find hard to follow. Still, the book should appeal to readers who want to know more about the martial art or those who need a little motivational push.
An inspirational account that delivers some valuable taekwondo advice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 173
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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