With the help of former Sports Illustrated associate editor Yeager (co-author, with John Wooden: A Game Plan for Life: The...
Hulking NFL tackle and subject of the film The Blind Side (2009) blends practical advice with autobiography in this intimate ghetto-survival guide.
With the help of former Sports Illustrated associate editor Yeager (co-author, with John Wooden: A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring, 2009, etc.), Oher tells his often-compelling Horatio Alger story sans the entertainment-industry embellishment of the Hollywood version of his life in The Blind Side, first a book by Michael Lewis, then a popular movie. Oher’s young life was shaped by an intense love for sports, especially basketball and football, but also profoundly affected by the netherworld of the ghettoes in Memphis. The author writes about having to cope with an absentee father and an undependable, crack-smoking mother, and about his time bouncing around the foster-care system and supporting himself through petty theft. Eventually, he made decent money selling newspapers on street corners. His major first steps out of the ghetto came in high school, when, despite early trouble with academics, Oher was accepted to the reputable private school Briarcrest. However, his intermittent homelessness didn’t officially end until local Good Samaritan Leigh Ann Tuohy offered him the closest thing to a permanent residence he’d ever had. Tuohy’s guardianship served as a launching pad for Oher’s successful high-school athletic career, which led to a scholarship with the University of Mississippi and to an eventual first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens. The book is strongest when Oher conveys his hard-won wisdom through specific examples and anecdotes from his life. When he dispenses more generalized advice, the narrative reads like a generic public-service announcement.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-592-40612-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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