Bowden family values rule in this curious mixture of football and inspirational philosophies. For those familiar with big-time college football, the Bowden name is synonymous with winning. Bobby, the close-knit clan's partiarch, is coach of the Florida State University Seminoles, a one-time NCAA champion and perennial powerhouse. Bobby and his wife, Ann, have six childrens—two girls and four boys—five of whom have, in one capacity or another, followed their father into football (eldest son Steve remains the holdout—he is a minister/educator). Less well-known, however, is that the Bowdens are devout evangelical Protestants. This book takes the form of a kind of dinner table discussion about life, kids, faith, love, leadership, loyalty, competition, and gender issues, conveniently couched in the lexicon and contexts of the occasionally inconsistent realms of gridiron life and individual salvation. Scattered among the scores of platitudes (``Most of the time when you lose, it's because the other team is a little better than you. . . . The key, I think, is to make sure you take something away from those losses'') are some genuinely perceptive thoughts, many provided by Steve, who gently opposes Dad's fundamentalist point of view. Wife Ann describes Bobby, her husband of 47 years, as a man of unshakable faith who ``accepts the Bible as the Word of God.'' This and other highly personal insights the Bowdens share about one another should intrigue football fans who associate Bobby's Seminoles or Terry's Auburn Tigers (or, for the record, most other successful football programs) with the frequent misdeeds of some of their players. To be fair, all the Bowdens seem comfortable, sincere, and mostly nonjudgmental in their faith. However, with their highly successful personal and professional lives, they seem at times to be a bit out of touch with other aspects of life. Surefire inspiration for those who are inspired by the Bowdens; not much of anything for anyone else.
Pub Date: Sept. 11, 1996
ISBN: 0-446-52050-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
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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