God and the gridiron define the young life of the winningest quarterback in NCAA Division I football history.
No one knows for sure what kind of NFL QB former Texas Longhorn signal-caller Colt McCoy will turn out to be. The youngster looked promising in limited work with the Cleveland Browns during his rookie season last year, but it wasn’t nearly enough to start drawing comparisons to Browns legend Bernie Kosar. Still, as anyone with even a passing interest in the game knows, just getting to the NFL is a stunning achievement. Handing off the narrative to each other as they march downfield, McCoy and his father Brad offer a glimpse into how a small-town Texan was able to realize his big-league ambitions in this intimate look at how one football-obsessed family has successfully navigated their way to the NFL. Sure, it helped that Brad was a respected high-school football coach, but his 24-year-old Evangelical Christian son would have readers believe that it was the Almighty who really pushed him across the goal line. That fact should be understood at the outset—the fiercely devout McCoys are on a mission and proselytizing. The younger McCoy never misses an opportunity to sling a Bible verse at readers. If that kind of thing turns you off, look elsewhere. But if you’re down with the program, or just want to know more about the new hope of the Cleveland Browns offense, then this conversational account of Colt’s rise to the top should suffice.
Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 9781616266592
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Barbour
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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