by Carmen L. Cozza & Rick Odermatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999
A beloved career college football coach reflects back on his coaching years in this endearing and modest autobiography. For 32 years, Cozza served as Yale’s football coach: From 1965 to 1996, his overall record was a .599 (179 wins, 119 losses, and 5 ties), with four championships and five co-championships. But although key games and rivalries are retold in detailed fashion, what comes out most in True Blue, co-written with Odermatt, a former newspaper reporter, columnist, and editor, is Coach Cozza’s appreciation for and commitment to his players. Cozza writes lovingly of his former players, including 14 who ended up in the NFL (such as Calvin Hill, Gary Fencik, John Spagnola, Dick Jauron), others now famous in other endeavors (Stone Phillips, Jack Ford), but most of whom found fame only in their college football years. Stories of young men who played hurt, such as Kelly Ryan and Jon Reese, are retold in a folkloric, inspiring way. Cozza, who turned down the position of athletic director in 1976 to remain the football coach, also shares his opinions on many issues such as the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and the restriction of competition. Most significantly, Cozza writes about the decline of Yale football, citing many factors including: the change from NCAA Division I-A to Division I-AA; the halving of male enrollment at the school due to coeducation; the escalating cost of education at Yale, which offers no athletic or full-ride merit scholarships; recruiting excesses and abuses that were a result of the proliferation of TV money; the dropping of Ivy League games from network telecasts; and an unresponsive admissions office. A book that will make all Yalies and Ivy League football lovers a little nostalgic. Coach Cozza’s story and his modest and paternal way of developing student-athletes can also serve as a blueprint for all college coaches.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-08099-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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