A well-crafted life of a man who, though now largely out of the spotlight, enjoyed a storied career.
Thoughtful portrait of the 1977 Heisman Trophy Winner and 1991 inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Earl Campbell (b. 1955), writes Austin American-Statesman reporter Price (Year of the Dunk: A Modest Defiance of Gravity, 2015, etc.), was a force of nature on the field, “a modern John Henry, the heroic and tragic figure of a hard-working, plow-straight-ahead man who worked himself into a broken-down condition by giving it his all—his body an atlas of the brutality of the game.” Born in small-town Texas, Campbell always had “country manners” that led some to think of him as a bumpkin, which he answered with a stiff arm and phenomenal moves on the field that led many students of the game to consider him one of the greatest players ever. Campbell was a fearsome player who graced the campus of the University of Texas, once a bastion of segregation, at a time when Austin was emerging as a perhaps unlikely capital of hippiedom. Price’s portrait of a town where “on game days in the parking lot of Mother Earth, a club not far from campus, you could barter football tickets for weed” is nicely detailed, and it’s telling that as part of his rookie hazing on the roster of the Houston Oilers, Campbell sang “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up To Be Cowboys.” Price knows his sports, and he writes well about such things as the Landry Shift—“a beat after taking their stance…the offensive linemen, in unison, would stand and reset”—and Campbell’s considerable skills as a running back. More than that, he discusses Campbell’s college and pro careers against the backdrop of racism that accompanied the “shift from crew cuts to Afros” of which he was a part, considering himself to be a champion of racial reconciliation who had the outward demeanor of a “smiling athlete" but was altogether serious.
A well-crafted life of a man who, though now largely out of the spotlight, enjoyed a storied career.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1649-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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