Like the man himself, this long-awaited memoir by football Hall-of-Famer and broadcaster Gifford is a measured, straightforward, good-natured piece of work. With the help of Newsweek's Waters, Gifford (12 years in the NFL, All-Pro at three positions) looks back on 40 years of football and celebrity with ``awe and gratitude.'' He opens characteristically, with a humbling experience: the New York Giants' loss in the 1958 title game to Baltimore, when he fumbled twice, both fumbles leading to Colts touchdowns. Despite his NFL achievements, short-lived acting career, and longtime marriage to TV-star Kathie Lee Gifford, the author's 23 years on Monday Night Football are of greatest interest here, and he devotes ample space to them. Gifford writes compassionately of Howard Cosell despite the elder sportscaster having ``bad-mouthed me'' and ``carved me up in his books,'' and he calls his good friend Don Meredith ``one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet'' in spite of Meredith's TV-cultivated image as a good ol' boy. Gifford names current partner Al Michaels as ``the best play-by-play man in the business,'' and Dan Dierdorf as ``the only former lineman I've ever met who knows the entire game'' of football. Looking back on his playing days, the author cites as highlights his 1956 MVP season, when the Giants won it all, and the championship teams of the early 1960's. He also provides an amusing recounting of the famous hit laid on him in 1960 by Philadelphia linebacker Chuck Bednarik, which resulted in ``a deep brain concussion.'' Profiles of Vince Lombardi, Paul Brown, and former teammates Sam Huff, Y.A. Tittle, Charlie Conerly, and Kyle Rote paint a vivid picture of the era, as do Gifford's reminiscences of late 1950's New York nightlife. Charming and appealing...nicely done, with barely a touch of vitriol. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41543-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. 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. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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