For fans only.
An expatriate sportswriter finds comfort, entertainment and perplexity in the big business of British soccer.
After witnessing everything from the congressional baseball steroid hearings to Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, two-time Pulitzer nominee Culpepper had become quite cynical about his livelihood. In 2006, relocating to London “for the oldest reason in the book—love,” he left behind the corruption and blatant narcissism of American sports, as well as his privileged media observation post, to become an ordinary soccer fan. England’s Premier League provoked culture shock. Shabby, unadorned locker rooms were the rule, Culpepper found, even for superstar teams like Manchester United. Severely restricted media access to the facilities for pre- and post-game interviews enshrouded British teams in a certain mystery. Fan-seating segregation in stadiums, the unspoken understanding that closely seated spectators did not fraternize and the blatant overuse of expletives also proved head-turning. After much deliberation and attending months of games and related events, the author chose to align himself with an underdog team, Portsmouth. Though it held a dismal 19th place in the rankings, he watched the team improve steadily over the course of the season and observed its devoted, good-natured fans. Culpepper diligently makes comparisons between American and English sports ethics, but he also finds commonalities in the players’ hubris as well as their monetary greed. His love of soccer comes through as he navigates England’s complex, multitiered competition. What’s lacking, however, is sufficient material on the personal side of his experience. Culpepper’s staunch, unwavering focus on the sport itself may be honorable, but the result is an aloof chronicle marinated in factoids and lingo.
For fans only.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2808-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
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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