![]() ![]() 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. Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.Ī neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer. 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. 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. Boxing fans interested in this minor tragic figure should be captivated.Ī gritty, absorbing account of a boxer who couldn’t defeat his own inner demons.Įlie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. Stradley narrates all of this in a clipped, hard-hitting narrative style that makes no excuses and offers no apologies. He suspected his wife was having an affair, that strangers were cheating him and intending him harm, and that the “police, Venezuelan gangsters,” and even his mother “were conspiring against him.” In 2010, “loaded to the gills” with cocaine, he supposedly killed his wife in a hotel room and later took his own life in custody. ![]() Along the way, his ferocity and ability in the ring drew comments from expert sports watchers, many of whom are quoted in the work as saying things like “Every now and then in the sport of boxing you see somebody come along and you’ll say, ‘That’s a guy that’s got the goods.’ ” As the author observes, “With a style suited to the professional ranks, and a hunger for fame, Valero could invade these lower weight classes like the Visigoths sacking Rome.” Alongside this portrait of growing fame and professional success, Stradley darkens the picture of Valero’s personal life, in which heavy drug use (and no doubt repeated head trauma) gradually took over and turned the fighter into what the author refers to simply as “a Rorschach test made in blood.” The drug use made him intensely paranoid. He made his professional boxing debut in 2002 and rose quickly in the fighting ranks, briefly holding a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest number of first-round knockouts in his super-featherweight division. Valero was born in 1981, joined children’s criminal gangs early on, started drinking and doing drugs before hitting puberty, and soon began winning amateur national boxing championships. Stradley’s book, the first installment of the Hamilcar Noir series, tells the story of champion boxer Edwin Valero. A debut biography focuses on a Venezuelan boxer’s troubled life and times.
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