Insightful, engaging and a must-read for sports fans interested in teasing out the true RG3.
A spellbinding biography tracing Robert Griffin III’s meteoric rise to sport superstardom.
In his debut book, Washington Post writer Sheinin crafts an engrossing portrait of Griffin, aka RG3, the 2011 Heisman Trophy winner and the current quarterback for the Washington Redskins. However, Sheinin’s work transcends RG3’s on-field heroics, focusing instead on the psychological portrait of a man whose personality and demeanor appear at odds with the typical franchise quarterback. “In school, Griffin was that rare kid who bridged social cliques,” writes the author, “a star jock who also liked poetry, who made straight A’s, who wore silly socks and still loved his superhero figurines.” He was also a boy who loved football third (after basketball and track) and who, at the age of 12, promised his mother that if tackled, he would quit the sport altogether. It was just the motivation he required to ensure that he wasn’t brought down, the spark that kept him pulling a tire uphill late into the evening as he transformed himself into an athlete of the highest level. Sheinin, who spent a year reporting on RG3, provides rare insight into the star’s home life by incorporating firsthand interviews with Griffin’s parents, both of whom describe raising their son in a Christian, color-blind household. Yet upon RG3’s entrance onto the national stage, the young quarterback soon found himself embroiled in a racially charged maelstrom when an African-American commentator insinuated that Griffin wasn’t a true “brother.” RG3’s skillful handling of the situation further proved that he was “comfortable in the spotlight, but wasn’t one to seek it out”—a man who, while mysterious, was quite clear in his preference for heaving touchdowns rather than making headlines.
Insightful, engaging and a must-read for sports fans interested in teasing out the true RG3.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-16545-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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
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
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