A sturdy and surprising work: good reading for fans of boxing and American history alike.
A Muhammad Ali for his time rises and falls in this vigorous history by Ken Burns collaborator Ward (Not for Ourselves Alone, 1999, etc.).
Born Arthur John Johnson in Galveston in 1878, Jack Johnson “was an inexhaustible tender of his own legend, a teller of tall tales in the frontier tradition of his native state.” He remembered his father, for instance, as “the most perfect physical specimen I have ever seen,” even though the man was only five and a half feet tall and was disabled by a bad leg earned in the Civil War. Years later, he would allow a legend to surround him that he single-handedly captured a U-boat on the high seas, “subdued the Austrian captain and blew up the submarine and was rescued after drifting three days.” Johnson himself, Ward writes, was magnificent, handsome, and picture-perfect, and he attracted women of all races as he traveled from city to city and continent to continent, taking on all contenders in prize matches. Indeed, he wrote, “I have found no better way of avoiding race prejudice than to act with people of other races as if prejudice did not exist.” It did, of course, in those days of Jim Crow, and Jack Johnson was derided by the press and eventually investigated by the fledgling FBI on charges of having engaged in white slavery. He was, Ward writes, “a master of timing in the ring. . . . Outside the ropes, that mastery often deserted him.” Johnson eventually fled the charges and lived in exile in Paris and elsewhere abroad, evidently regarding WWI as a personal affront but taking pride in the fact that the French artillery had named a big cannon after him for the punch it packed and the black smoke it raised. On returning to the US, Johnson spent only nine months in federal prison and was released for good behavior, but his magic was broken.
A sturdy and surprising work: good reading for fans of boxing and American history alike.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41532-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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