Mostly entertaining but not a standout. Coulda been a contender, but the author touches too lightly on the hard questions...
FOXSports.com columnist Kriegel (Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich, 2007, etc.) tells the story of a Youngstown, Ohio, lightweight boxer whose brief championship reign included a notorious 1982 bout that ended with the death of opponent Duk Koo Kim.
The author begins with that deadly fight and then shows us a Santa Monica restaurant where Mancini regularly hangs out today with David Mamet, actor Ed O’Neill and others. Kriegel’s cinematic style—quick cuts, lots of dialogue, crisp characterization—works well in a story that in its early stages will remind readers of the Rocky films—and why not? Stallone became a friend and produced a TV movie about Mancini’s life. The author sketches some quick scenes of family history (the first arrived at Ellis Island in 1913), the early family struggles, his father’s promising boxing career (terminated by injuries in World War II) and Mancini’s rise in the amateur ranks. Spliced throughout are sad economic portraits of Youngstown, depressing accounts of the prominence of the Mob in the area and some scattered history of televised boxing. Kriegel shows us that Mancini was not a flashy Sugar Ray Leonard but a straight-ahead slug-and-be-slugged fighter who wore his opponents down with ferocity and heavy punches. The cameras and celebrities loved him (Bill Cosby shocked Mancini’s handlers when he gave Mancini advice in his corner during the Kim fight). Kriegel deals in some detail with the death fight, devoting a chapter to Kim’s family (he returns to them at the end). Mancini soon lost his title, tried a couple of comebacks, tried Hollywood, married, had children and divorced.
Mostly entertaining but not a standout. Coulda been a contender, but the author touches too lightly on the hard questions about celebrity, violence and money in America.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7432-8635-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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