A provocative thesis bolstered by amusing and instructive anecdotes—but there is a flaw in the defensive line.
The author of Why Read? (2004) and other works of cultural criticism returns with a memoir/treatise about those personal virtues he traces back to his years playing high school football.
Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia; Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, 2013, etc.) arranges each chapter in similar fashion. Each has a theme (courage, manliness, faith, etc.) that he introduces with football memories and expands with later-life examples. Throughout, the author acknowledges the dangers of the game—though for a more incisive discussion of that aspect of the game, see Steve Almond’s Against Football—and he is far too complex a thinker to simply repeat the mantras of coaches and unthinking fans (“Football builds character!”). Moreover, he adorns his text with allusions to writers and literary works. Melville, Joyce, Homer (there is a lot about The Iliad here), Emerson, Ellison, Hemingway, Dickey—these and others form his offensive line. Edmundson also employs references to popular culture (Johnny Carson is on special teams), and there are lots of engaging stories about high school. He begins with boyhood memories of watching football on TV with his father, who made a great ritual of Sundays spent watching his beloved New York Giants—though he had a great fondness, as well, for Jim Brown and Y.A. Tittle. Edmundson writes about how he was sort of disconnected when he decided to give the game a whirl and surprised himself with his assiduousness and determination. He is appealingly self-deprecating throughout and quite certain that it was on the gridiron that he learned and developed his adult virtues. Although he does have a few gratuitous (and unconvincing) comments about women (how do they become virtuous?), he does not have much to say about how non–football-playing young men develop their courage, character, manliness, loyalty and so on.
A provocative thesis bolstered by amusing and instructive anecdotes—but there is a flaw in the defensive line.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-575-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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