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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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