Nevertheless, this should be required reading for sports fans of all backgrounds.
A distressing account of the challenges faced by the first black basketball players in two of the South’s most prominent collegiate athletic conferences.
Occasional game highlights aside, Jacobs (Coach K’s Little Blue Book: Fire, Fact, and Insight from College Basketball's Best Coach, 2000, etc.) provides more of a pellucid explication of southern integration than a thrilling basketball chronicle. Beginning with Billy Jones and Pete Johnson at the University of Maryland in 1964 and concluding with Larry Fry and Jerry Jenkins at Mississippi State University in 1971, the author details the difficulties faced by pioneering black athletes at each school in both the Southeastern and Atlantic Coast conferences. For some, such as Coolidge Ball at the University of Mississippi and Larry Robinson at the University of Tennessee, the experience was largely devoid of the overt racism faced by the majority of their peers. Most, however, found themselves the recipients of racial slurs (even on their home courts), indifferent treatment from coaches and university officials and bewildered stares from teammates. A numbing sense of repetition creeps in as Jacobs works his way from Maryland to North Carolina to Georgia to Mississippi. Integration was so slow in coming in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that for many of the players, college was the first time they attended school alongside whites. The author’s exhaustive interviews and impeccable research present a gut-wrenchingly clear picture of the obstacles the athletes encountered, but he rarely strays outside the sporting community for commentary, making it difficult to properly contextualize their impact on the civil-rights movement. A lack of closing observations exacerbates this shortcoming.
Nevertheless, this should be required reading for sports fans of all backgrounds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59921-042-1
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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