Cordial and courtly: Wilkens’s memoir is no classic, but it’s still of considerable appeal to roundball fans.
A welcome memoir by a pioneer of integrated pro basketball.
Writing with Akron Beacon Journal sports columnist Pluto, Wilkens recounts his long career as a player and coach—one of only two entrants in the Basketball Hall of Fame to be honored for his accomplishments in both roles. The son of an African-American father and Irish-American mother, Wilkens grew up in the 1940s in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, now largely black but then a polyethnic, polyglot neighborhood. “Only later,” he writes, “did I realize how unique this situation was and how it affected my life: I never doubted that people from different races could work with each other and be friends, because I saw it every day of my life while growing up.” Wilkens’s catholicity was put to the test when, after earning an economics degree with distinction, he first went in to the NBA and confronted segregation within and without the arena. His offended sense of justice takes second place in this narrative, however, to straightforward sports memoir, as he relates his episodic education in how the game of basketball can and should be played. Evidently, Wilkens’s keyword is respect, for, despite having had to deal with ego hounds like Scottie Pippen and Charles Barkley, he has almost nothing but warmly generous words for his players and colleagues. Still, at many points, especially when considering modern players’ huge salaries (as a rookie he had to work during the off-season as a salesman to make ends meet) and team perks like private first-class jet travel and hotel suites, Wilkens longs for the relatively pure old days, when basketball games “weren’t played in luxurious arenas with corporate boxes with wine and cheese and caviar. . . . They were played in something called an ‘armory,’ an old barn of a building that smelled of stale cigar smoke, spilled beer, and hot dogs on the grill.”
Cordial and courtly: Wilkens’s memoir is no classic, but it’s still of considerable appeal to roundball fans.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87374-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
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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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