A compelling portrait of a dynamic and influential man, on and off the court.
Biographer Schumacher (Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 2005, etc.) turns his eye to a basketball legend.
Renowned as the Minneapolis Lakers’ All-Star center, George Mikan began life in 1924 as the son of a Joliet, Ill., tavern owner. He studied to become a priest, then switched to law, before his prowess on the hardwood led him to the emerging sport of professional basketball. At DePaul University, he established himself as one of the nation’s best players and led his team to a collegiate championship. His dominance as a center earned him a contract with the Chicago American Gears. Schumacher provides a detailed account of how Mikan altered the way basketball was played by proving that a center could do more than leap for the jump ball to start games. He became a pre-eminent scorer, so unstoppable that several rule changes were made specifically to limit his dominance. Schumacher also shows the evolution of professional basketball, as the sport’s rising popularity convinced owners that it could be a lucrative business. But he doesn’t sentimentalize the past: Mikan staged a holdout when the financially strapped Gears tried to cut his salary, Schumacher notes, and he expected his teammates to defer to him at all times. He went to the Lakers in 1947, and his intensity brought the team multiple titles. Recognized by the NBA in 1996 as one of its 50 greatest players of all time, he tirelessly crusaded to get better pensions for former players. The men who had established the league that allowed players like Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Garnett to earn $100-million contracts, Mikan reminded fans, received a mere $1,700 per month in retirement benefits. He made significant progress for his fellow retired players, but lost a leg and several fingers to diabetes before dying in 2005.
A compelling portrait of a dynamic and influential man, on and off the court.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59691-213-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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