By Maria Isabel Sánchez Vegara
A short picture-book life of Bruce Lee, who grew up between Hong Kong and America, invented his own faster kind of kung fu, and became the most famous martial artist in the world.
Bruce was born in San Francisco and grew up in Hong Kong, where he acted in movies as a child and got into enough trouble as a teenager that his family sent him back to America to start fresh. There he studied philosophy at university and taught kung fu to anyone who wanted to learn. The old, rigid styles frustrated him, so he built his own, faster and looser and more his own. He became a movie star whose fighting looked like nothing audiences had seen, and he opened doors for Asian actors in a Hollywood that had mostly kept them out. Like all the Little People, Big Dreams books, it's a simple, stylized telling of one real life, with a page of photographs and dates at the back.
For the martial-arts-mad child who's starting to wonder whether any of this is real, Bruce Lee is about as real as it gets. The book gives your child the shape of a whole life in a handful of pages they can actually manage. It's inspiring in the plain way these books are: here's someone who didn't fit the standard mold and made his own way instead. I'd keep it on the shelf near the sillier ninja books, because it's the one that shows a real person doing the years of work the cartoon versions skip past.