A beloved career college football coach reflects back on his coaching years in this endearing and modest autobiography. For 32 years, Cozza served as Yale’s football coach: From 1965 to 1996, his overall record was a .599 (179 wins, 119 losses, and 5 ties), with four championships and five co-championships. But although key games and rivalries are retold in detailed fashion, what comes out most in True Blue, co-written with Odermatt, a former newspaper reporter, columnist, and editor, is Coach Cozza’s appreciation for and commitment to his players. Cozza writes lovingly of his former players, including 14 who ended up in the NFL (such as Calvin Hill, Gary Fencik, John Spagnola, Dick Jauron), others now famous in other endeavors (Stone Phillips, Jack Ford), but most of whom found fame only in their college football years. Stories of young men who played hurt, such as Kelly Ryan and Jon Reese, are retold in a folkloric, inspiring way. Cozza, who turned down the position of athletic director in 1976 to remain the football coach, also shares his opinions on many issues such as the antiwar demonstrations of the 1960s and the restriction of competition. Most significantly, Cozza writes about the decline of Yale football, citing many factors including: the change from NCAA Division I-A to Division I-AA; the halving of male enrollment at the school due to coeducation; the escalating cost of education at Yale, which offers no athletic or full-ride merit scholarships; recruiting excesses and abuses that were a result of the proliferation of TV money; the dropping of Ivy League games from network telecasts; and an unresponsive admissions office. A book that will make all Yalies and Ivy League football lovers a little nostalgic. Coach Cozza’s story and his modest and paternal way of developing student-athletes can also serve as a blueprint for all college coaches.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-08099-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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