And Brennan herself makes a fine role model, as a lucid, evenhanded journalist.
Arriving well in time for Father’s Day, Brennan’s memoir moves with grace and precision through the details of her life as a stereotype-shattering sportswriter, crediting the life-coaching she received from her dad with teaching her how to go her own way.
Her account begins with childhood as a tomboy and stats geek, then moves on to what she self-deprecatingly calls her teenage “Frankenstein” phase, playing sports before girls’ athletics had institutional support, and finally to her rapid though not easy ascent into the upper echelon of sportswriters. (She was the first woman to cover a football teams from its locker room.) Brennan’s narrative generally stays close to home and to the man who taught her the fundamentals. Dad, who once tried out for the Cleveland Browns, had the sense to let his children be nothing but themselves. If his daughter developed an obsession with the Toledo Rockets football team and the minor league Mud Hens, then so be it. And if she wanted to play sports, he would be close at hand, either on the field with her or watching from the stands. In the moderately Republican Brennan household, basic fairness mattered most; the word “feminist” wouldn’t have been used, since nobody there had much use for labels. The author, naturally, is a robust defender of Title IX equity, and she praises those who have given girls worthy role models in sports: Billie Jean King, the Women’s World Cup team, Annika Sorenstam.
And Brennan herself makes a fine role model, as a lucid, evenhanded journalist.Pub Date: May 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5436-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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