All legendary athletes should hope for treatment by such capable, compassionate hands.
A sympathetic, moving life of the Brown Bomber by veteran cultural historian and biographer Roberts (History/Purdue Univ.; The Rock, the Curse, and the Hub: A Random History of Boston Sports, 2005, etc.).
As the author tells it, the story of Joseph Louis Barrow (1914–1981) is humbling, inspiring, depressing and deeply emotional. Born into a laboring family in rural Alabama, Louis, the seventh of eight children, showed no particular aptitude for much of anything. When his father’s mental illness consumed him, Louis’s mother remarried, and Joe eventually discovered the boxing world, where he began using Louis for a surname and discovered—after some shocks, disappointments and hard knocks—that he had the ability to be something special. And he was. As Roberts shows, America was a vilely racist society, both in the Jim Crow South and in the North. Louis, groomed by his handlers to be the laconic antithesis to the flamboyant Jack Johnson, still had the burden of an Atlas on his shoulders—the burden of the American black world, whose population grew to revere him and anoint him their avatar, their warrior who defeated, one after another, the representatives of oppressive white America. As war with Germany loomed, Louis came to represent America itself in his second fight (he’d lost the first) with the German Max Schmeling, who cavorted with Nazis and hung with Hitler. Roberts handles the boxing action with professional aplomb, and he knows when to cut away to tell us something of consequence and when to return to the ring. The author ably chronicles Louis’s rise from Alabama cotton fields to the cavernous Yankee Stadium, where celebrities glittered in the ringside seats for his big fights; the development of the mass media (boxing was enormously popular on radio); Louis’s career in the U.S. Army; and his sad decline, amid unpayable debts and mental illness.
All legendary athletes should hope for treatment by such capable, compassionate hands.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-300-12222-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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
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