Occasionally clichéd, occasionally maudlin, but, overall, candid, thoughtful, and compelling.
The mother of renowned cyclist Lance Armstrong tells her own story, looking back on years filled with childhood poverty, teenage pregnancy, a disapproving mother, an alcoholic father, workplace hurdles, abusive husbands—and lots of love flowing to and from her son.
Fifty-year-old Kelly (the name she took from her current husband, number four) grew up in Dallas housing projects without amenities. She performed well in the classroom and in extracurricular activities, however, until becoming involved with one of the fast guys. Pregnant at 16, giving birth to Lance at 17, Kelly convinced the biological father to marry her. But he was frequently irresponsible and restless, eventually leaving his wife and son. Without any college education, Kelly struggled to find secretarial jobs that would pay the bills, and, after years of proving herself in the workplace, she became a telecommunications company executive with vast responsibilities. Proving herself in the world of marriage turned out to be harder. Husband number two was an abusive philanderer. Number three was considerate but lost job after job because of alcoholism. Only after Lance Armstrong achieved fame and wealth as a world-class athlete did Kelly find the quality husband she had been seeking for decades. Working with professional writer and cancer survivor Rodgers (Bald in the Land of Big Hair, 2001), Kelly touches hearts and minds in chapter after chapter. This is especially true when she recounts how she helped Lance beat life-threatening testicular cancer diagnosed when he was 25. Then she cheered him through his recovery until he won the Tour de France for a record sixth time. Some of the story has been told by Armstrong in It’s Not About the Bike. But most of the material is fresh. Toward book’s end, the saga moves to a new generation, now that Kelly is grandmother to Lance’s children.
Occasionally clichéd, occasionally maudlin, but, overall, candid, thoughtful, and compelling.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-1855-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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 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
BOOK REVIEW
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