God and the gridiron define the young life of the winningest quarterback in NCAA Division I football history.
No one knows for sure what kind of NFL QB former Texas Longhorn signal-caller Colt McCoy will turn out to be. The youngster looked promising in limited work with the Cleveland Browns during his rookie season last year, but it wasn’t nearly enough to start drawing comparisons to Browns legend Bernie Kosar. Still, as anyone with even a passing interest in the game knows, just getting to the NFL is a stunning achievement. Handing off the narrative to each other as they march downfield, McCoy and his father Brad offer a glimpse into how a small-town Texan was able to realize his big-league ambitions in this intimate look at how one football-obsessed family has successfully navigated their way to the NFL. Sure, it helped that Brad was a respected high-school football coach, but his 24-year-old Evangelical Christian son would have readers believe that it was the Almighty who really pushed him across the goal line. That fact should be understood at the outset—the fiercely devout McCoys are on a mission and proselytizing. The younger McCoy never misses an opportunity to sling a Bible verse at readers. If that kind of thing turns you off, look elsewhere. But if you’re down with the program, or just want to know more about the new hope of the Cleveland Browns offense, then this conversational account of Colt’s rise to the top should suffice.
Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 9781616266592
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Barbour
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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