Enlightening for those interested in performance psychology, kinetic motion analysis and the “competitive temperament” of...
A yearlong, behind-the-scenes look at the booming—and lucrative—business of coaching upcoming quarterbacks.
Across all sports, coaching is a $5.9 billion industry. Fox Sports’ senior football commentator Feldman (Meat Market: Inside the Smash-Mouth World of College Football Recruiting, 2008, etc.) examines the elite #TDFB high school football quarterback training camp (and related programs) created by ex–NFL quarterback Trent Dilfer—what Dilfer calls a “holistic coaching ecosystem that unites coaches and expands their influence”—for athletes and independent coaches. The author chronicles the progress and development (and emotional immaturity) of frenetic, loose cannon QB (Feldman calls them QBs throughout the book) Johnny Manziel from his time at Texas A&M University, his performance at the high-stakes NFL Combine and first-round selection in the NFL draft. Feldman also examines the career of veteran QB coach George Whitfield Jr., the “QB Whisperer,” who has trained several star NFL quarterbacks. Credit Feldman for inserting himself in camp and sharing a variety of inside observations—e.g., the most desirable characteristic scouts look for in a high school recruit isn't hand size, arm strength or even accuracy, but an intangible “magic,” what Dilfer calls “Dude Qualities.” It’s the ability to thrive in high-pressure situations, how you “own the environment.” In a chapter Feldman amusingly and fittingly titles “The Pageant World For Boys,” he reports on how parents will pay $700 per hour for one-on-one coaching and that a year of tutoring at a QB camp can cost $60,000. Indeed, access to exclusive coaching appeals to “QB dads,” whom he describes as Type-A, myopic and even nutty. Feldman reveals Dilfer's vision for his football enterprises as well as his frequent, pompous declarations, such as describing coach Whitfield as “a rock star in the QB space.”
Enlightening for those interested in performance psychology, kinetic motion analysis and the “competitive temperament” of alpha males.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0553418453
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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