A must-read for fans, but fails to capture the true essence of Bettis’s charisma.
Self-serving career retrospective from one of the NFL’s all-time leading rushers and all-around nice guys.
Bettis’s life is a checklist of quintessential sports fairy-tale elements: dangerous childhood in a poor Detroit neighborhood; drug deals and bad influences; hardworking, supportive parents who instilled values; scholarship to prestigious university (Notre Dame); illustrious and potentially hall-of-fame career in the NFL; storybook ending after winning the Super Bowl in his last game—in his hometown of Detroit, no less. It’s beyond question that “the Bus,” an immensely popular player as a result of his talent, charm and tireless philanthropy, has a tale to tell. Too often, however, what could have been an enlightening, inspiring look inside professional football by an intelligent man who overcame overwhelming obstacles becomes a rote recitation of game statistics accented by a discordant measure of braggadocio. Bettis chronicles nearly every good game he ever played and offers justifications for some of the bad ones, ranging from the numerous painful injuries he suffered throughout his career to a lack of talented teammates. ESPN writer Wojciechowski (Cubs Nation: 162 Games, 162 Stories, 1 Addiction, 2005, etc.) valiantly tries to inject some life into each chapter via descriptive introductions and interviews with friends, and the duo does manage to provide some genuinely touching moments, particularly when highlighting the unswerving loyalty the Bus inspired in teammates like Hines Ward and Ben Roethlisberger. The book works best when Bettis discusses his relationships with his family and other players or riffs on random topics ranging from his love of bowling to his condemnation of Notre Dame for its relatively quick firing of black head coach Tyrone Willingham. When it loses itself in the congratulatory minutiae of its subject’s accomplishments, however, readers are likely to start heading for the exits.
A must-read for fans, but fails to capture the true essence of Bettis’s charisma.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52061-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
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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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