A sturdy contribution to the literature of the sweet science, reminding readers of a bygone era of fighting.
“I will beat Joe Louis and I will beat any fighter I ever fight”: a satisfying biography of the iconic boxer, the only heavyweight champion to retire undefeated.
Born Rocco Marchegiano (1923-1969) to Italian immigrants in Massachusetts, Rocky Marciano wasn’t a pretty fighter. As Stanton (Journalism/Univ. of Connecticut; The Prince of Providence: The True Story of Buddy Cianci, America’s Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds, 2003) writes, he had “short, stubby arms, clumsy feet, and a bulldozer style that opened him up to fierce punishment.” He had a high-pitched voice and a gentle way outside the ring, but within it, he was lethal; his style may have lacked elegance, but he pounded his way through to 49 victories and zero defeats. Marciano also steered clear of the usual temptations of the ring—and of the mobsters that dominated the pro boxing business in those days. The author writes admiringly but not uncritically of Marciano, who, on leaving the sport, traded on his celebrity to snag free meals and hotel rooms and insisted on fat fees for showing up to events until his death in a plane crash. Stanton writes with knowing accuracy of the ins and outs of both boxing and Marciano’s storied career, including the development of what has forever since been known as the “Suzie-Q” punch and his work with Jewish trainers who, having worked the circuit themselves, appreciated Marciano’s ability to take a pounding and emerge the victor. As the author notes, many other fighters have held Marciano up as a model: Floyd Mayweather, a welterweight, waited for his 50th win before retiring undefeated, just to beat Marciano’s 49-win record, and Muhammad Ali reckoned that Marciano was the only fighter from the past who would have given him trouble in the ring. Famously, of course, Sylvester Stallone took big chunks of his screenplay for Rocky from Marciano’s life, which, overall, seems every bit as admirable as Rocky Balboa’s.
A sturdy contribution to the literature of the sweet science, reminding readers of a bygone era of fighting.Pub Date: June 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62779-919-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
