Miller’s tough-but-sensitive narrative voice is a force to be reckoned with.
Rough-and-tumble, survival-of-the-fittest memoir from world-class kickboxer Miller.
Miller takes a thoughtful but unsentimental look at his life as a professional fighter trying desperately to overcome a dangerous heart condition, diabetes and a failing marriage. Born in Pittsburgh, Miller’s family life was governed by fear of and loathing for his hyperviolent father, who had been a former NBA player in the league’s fledgling years. His mother played an ambivalent role in his life, and his brother, Colin, was a ne’er-do-well who got involved with drugs and crime and ended up dead of a heroin overdose years later. As an athlete, Miller first tried his luck at baseball in college, but arm injuries and a sense of general disillusionment eventually steered him away from the baseball diamond. To his father's disapproval, he soon explored the more obscure world of kickboxing and martial arts, where he quickly found his calling. However, after compiling an impressive win-loss record, Miller received the diagnosis of an enlarged ventricle in his heart. He underwent major surgery, thus putting his promising fight career on indefinite hold. The author is terse and brutally direct in his descriptions of the seemingly impossible task of recovering from his open-heart surgery and re-entering the ring. His no-holds-barred descriptions of his crumbling marriage and his bouts with alcoholism and financial difficulties, not to mention the deaths of his parents and his brother (all in the same year), don’t always make for comfortable reading. But after all the suffering and hardship, his tale is ultimately inspiring and upbeat. Despite nature’s best efforts to discourage him, Miller eventually made a near-miracle recovery; by 2010, he found himself in Moscow at a major professional tournament, successfully competing in the ring again.
Miller’s tough-but-sensitive narrative voice is a force to be reckoned with.Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222234-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Anthony Bourdain/Ecco
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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