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
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
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