Personal and often heartfelt reflections from Butkus on his love-hate relationship with the game of football. During the nine seasons (196573) he played middle linebacker for his hometown Chicago Bears, Butkus was one of the most feared, hated, and respected players in the NFL. He was one of the rare players whose very presence on the field changed forever the nature of his position. And in this frank and understated memoir, Butkus reveals how he came to play this way. By his own account, he was able to bottle up anger from Monday through Saturday and release it on the gridiron come Sunday. Naturally, this anger occasionally needed to be vented in other ways, all of which Butkus makes sound both logical and interesting: He liked to engage occasionally in boozy hi-jinks with friends and colleagues; he goaded the many sportswriters he mistrusted, especially Sports Illustrated's Dan Jenkins, who, he says, ``blindsided'' him in an article that labeled him ``A Special Kind of Brute with a Love of Violence''; he often bickered during salary negotiations with the Bears' autocratic owner and coach-for-life, George Halas. Despite pain and indignities suffered on and off the field, Butkus's enthusiasm for the game seldom waned. He notes the lasting impact of other players and coaches, among them his Bears teammate, Hall of Fame tailback Gayle Sayers; Colts quarterback Johnny Unitas (``the best quarterback of my time—maybe of all time''); and his one-time Bears defensive coach, George Allen. Butkus's obvious love of the game infuses with drama the chapters describing his decline as a player. Thankfully, he does not belabor us with too much detail about his post-football life and acting career, topics that he seems tacitly to acknowledge are more interesting to him than to his readers. A perceptive and occasionally humorous view from the trenches of a great era in pro football. (20 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48648-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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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