This is bound to be the best biography of Kobe Bryant for some time, even if at times it may be overkill.
A mammoth biography of one of basketball’s most complicated stars.
How readers respond to Lazenby’s (Michael Jordan: The Life, 2014, etc.) new tome will depend in no small part on how they feel about the Los Angeles Lakers’ mercurial Kobe Bryant and whether or not they buy into the idea that the recently retired superstar warrants a biography of more than 600 pages. There is no doubt that Bryant helped carry the NBA into the post–Michael Jordan era, but he was also difficult, hypercompetitive, and inclined toward self-aggrandizement—“showboat” was a nickname bestowed on him by teammates early in his career. Bryant alienated many of the people in his life, from teammates, whether little-used benchwarmers or future Hall of Famers, to family—he ended up estranged from even those who had been closest to him, including his parents (his father was a former NBA and Italian league player). Allegations of a sexual assault of a Colorado hotel worker in 2003 made him more toxic to some, even after authorities dropped the case when the alleged victim refused to testify. As he did with Michael Jordan and Jerry West, Lazenby tells Bryant’s story well, and he has a firm grip on the history and culture of the NBA. However, the question remains as to whether Bryant warrants this much space so soon after his 2016 retirement; it is likely too soon for the necessary critical distance in assessing his life and its significance in the history of the NBA. Customarily, such lengthy sports biographies require the subject to transcend sports, and Lazenby does not make a convincing enough case that Bryant does so. Still, the future Hall of Famer’s life is interesting, and much of the narrative is unquestionably compelling.
This is bound to be the best biography of Kobe Bryant for some time, even if at times it may be overkill.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-38724-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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