Hurley’s writing walks a fine line between unadorned and overly conversational, but the messages come through clearly, and...
Twenty-five state championships, four national championships, seven undefeated seasons: With the assistance of veteran co-author Paisner (co-author: Nobody's Perfect: Two Men, One Call, and a Game for Baseball History, 2011, etc.), Hurley tells the stories behind his remarkable success.
What are the numbers that a coach or athlete must garner before they are eligible to write the how-it’s-done guide to utter domination in the sport and in life? Without question, Hurley has met the requirements over his 40-plus seasons as head coach at St. Anthony High School in Jersey City, N.J., and a quote from Vince Lombardi at the beginning dispels the notion that Hurley is selling the idea that perfection can be achieved. Throughout, the author espouses the values of preparation and hard work in stories that span his career in coaching. Books from former coaches, proclaiming to deliver the secrets to success in sports, are a dime a dozen, but Hurley’s entry stands out as an example of how some of the older standards for sport—such as humility, the embrace of endless hard work, ignoring the trappings of success and the “bigger is better” mindset that leads athletes to put the bling before the ring—are still worthy standards to follow. Hurley often trained with the high school students he was coaching, to teach them that nobody, not even the coach, was above bettering themselves physically. At the same time, he writes, he questioned the impact it would have to erase one of the “lines” between the coach and the players, wondering if the benefits would outweigh the potential costs.
Hurley’s writing walks a fine line between unadorned and overly conversational, but the messages come through clearly, and fans of Friday Night Lights, as well as sports fans in general, will enjoy the author’s memories.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-98687-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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