An inspirational memoir that is ultimately more about fandom and drive than athleticism.
Cook describes his unlikely ascent from high school benchwarmer to walk-on athlete in one of the country’s premier college football programs in this debut sports memoir.
Growing up watching University of Georgia football games with his father, Cook knew that he wanted to one day play for the team himself. He had no idea how difficult a dream that was to accomplish, however, even for a talented football player—which he was not. “I wasn’t a standout on my high school football team,” recalls Cook in his introduction, “in fact, I wasn’t even a starter. I was a fourth-string linebacker and had recorded one tackle in my entire high school career.” Most people would have seen the writing on the wall, but Cook would not let himself be deterred. After getting his acceptance letter from the university, he quickly Googled how to try out for the team, though even that information wasn’t easily acquirable. The tryout process—which Cook literally snuck his way into under false pretenses—turned out to be a tiered, monthslong affair in which he competed against far more qualified athletes for one of the few open spots on the roster. Despite being small, slow, and weak by even the standards of his high school program, Cook began a Rudy Ruettiger–like rise. He showed that he could outwork any player he came up against, proving that his spirit and tenacity were enough to earn him the right to wear a Bulldogs jersey. Cook’s prose is simple and clean, and it emanates the considerable regard he has for the University of Georgia and its storied program: “I went to every home game that fall, and they all held new meaning for me. I still got as excited about games as I had when I was a kid, but it was different. I knew those guys; I had trained with them and practiced against them. I understood what went on behind the scenes.” While Cook’s narrative doesn’t have quite the same drama as that of Notre Dame’s famous walk-on, it offers wonderful insight into the functioning of an elite Division I program that should be of interest to any college football fan.
An inspirational memoir that is ultimately more about fandom and drive than athleticism.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1381-2
Page Count: 202
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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