Perhaps a little too conveniently, the book makes a split between slick, privileged, cocky “Sugar Ray” and the more insecure...
Not a knockout, but a revealing confession from a champ who was often accused of being a packaged TV commodity.
Leonard was the right fighter at the right time—an Olympic gold medalist, articulate, handsome and personable, at a time when the retirement of Muhammad Ali left boxing hungry for another standard-bearer (and Howard Cosell eager for a new buddy to tout). Yet, little known to the American public, he was also an abuser of cocaine, alcohol and ultimately of his wife. Now clean and sober for four years and happily remarried, he takes full responsibility for his transgressions—“Looking back, I can offer no defense for my conduct. I was wrong”—without absolving the women who threw themselves at him (more beautiful and greedy the more famous he became), the family and friends who put their financial considerations above his health and even trainer Angelo Dundee, whom he inherited from Ali, and who the author plainly believes has claimed more credit than he deserves. Though the thematic arc is that of a redemption story, most of that redemption—remarriage, sobriety, a second family that he treats much better than the first—is crammed into a final chapter or two. The bulk of the autobiography alternates between his exploits in the ring (of which he is justifiably proud) and his weakness away from it, with all the sex, drugs and vacillation between retirement and recommitment. Particularly revelatory is the book’s illumination of the psychology of this most physical sport. It also celebrates the bond between opponents that outsiders can never experience: “For months, the opponent was the enemy, the major obstacle standing in the path of greater earnings and greater fame. Yet, as most of us who fight for a living come to recognize, some sooner than others, the opponent is also a partner on the same journey.”
Perhaps a little too conveniently, the book makes a split between slick, privileged, cocky “Sugar Ray” and the more insecure and vulnerable “Ray Leonard.” Guess who’s still standing at the end?Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02272-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
