From the myth of this model of order, loyalty, and victory, Maraniss has fashioned a richly complicated counter life of a...
Though his subjects could not seem more different, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Maraniss finds in Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi as compelling and paradoxical a leader as Bill Clinton (First in His Class, 1995).
Like prior biographies, such as Michael O’Brien’s Vince (1987), Maraniss’s covers Lombardi’s childhood as the son of a Brooklyn butcher, college playing career as one of Fordham’s “Seven Blocks of Granite,” apprentice coaching at a small New Jersey high school called St. Cecilia’s, West Point, and the New York Giants, the five championships with the Packers in the ‘60s, and the last year with the Washington Redskins before dying from colon cancer in 1970. What else can be written about a coach who seemed to symbolize the best and worst of professional sports? As it turns out, quite a bit. Maraniss’s coach is less self-confident than the martinet of myth, more aware that his rage, while the source of his success, is also sinful and self-destructive. Lombardi could play that father figure more convincingly to his locker room band than he could with his wife, a secret drinker, and his children, whom he neglected. Frightened by the anarchy he saw in the late 1960s, he became a favorite of businessmen and conservative Republicans because of his belief that sports build character. His private actions might have surprised his admirers, however. On the negative side, he was not afraid to ask John Kennedy (whom he warmly supported) to defer stars Paul Hornung and Ray Nitschke from active duty in the army. More positively, he practiced quiet toleration, both of blacks and gays. In addition, Maraniss sensitively analyzes the influence of the coach’s zealous Catholicism on his work, and paints extraordinarily vivid tableaus.
From the myth of this model of order, loyalty, and victory, Maraniss has fashioned a richly complicated counter life of a sports icon committed to and consumed by the quest for perfection. (First serial to Vanity Fair)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84418-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
