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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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