A terrific memoir with lessons for young journalists, sports fans and anyone who shares the love of the games.
The classic American sportswriter reflects on a half-century of covering the games we play.
Boston Globe mainstay Ryan (The Best of Sport: Classic Writing from the Golden Era of Sports, 2005, etc.) is one of this country’s finest writers, period, fashioning wit, drama and sincerity into a wealth of stories about all kinds of sports until he went into semiretirement in 2012. Here, he recounts the arc of his career, shares advice from the golden age of old-school journalism and pens terrific anecdotes about some of basketball’s larger-than-life figures. He admits readily that his career was something of an accident, from his first internship at the Globe to inheriting the sports desk at the age of 23. “I was confident I could write a decent basketball story,” he writes. “But covering a team is something entirely different than writing about a sport. There is no manual. I’ve never discovered a course anyone can take. It is the ultimate trial-and-error experience.” Along the way, Ryan levies praise on giants like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, weighs in on the Michael Jordan versus LeBron James debate, and shares his memories of provocative coaches like Red Auerbach, Bob Knight and Chuck Daly. The author provides a solid mix of candid, respectful and honest assessments, with much of his trademark humor added in. Despite being known for his basketball lore, Ryan is also something of a multi-instrumentalist, offering thoughtful reflections on football, baseball, Olympic hockey and even the Great American Songbook. “I love sports and I want people to know it,” he writes. “I’d like to think the word people most associate with me is ‘enthusiasm.’ Give me a good game and I’ll be happy; as a fan I may regret the outcome, but as a journalist, I’ll appreciate the drama.”
A terrific memoir with lessons for young journalists, sports fans and anyone who shares the love of the games.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-506-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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