by Eddie Robinson with Richard Lapchick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1999
The philosophy of one of the top coaches in college football is showcased in this loving, uncontroversial autobiography. Robinson coached football at Grambling University, a traditionally African-American school, for 57 years. At the beginning of his career, colleges—and society—were still segregated, but Robinson handled each obstacle with a grace and determination instilled in him from childhood. This book, which is co-written with Lapchick, a columnist for the Sporting News, doesn—t offer Coach Robinson’s play-making techniques or much about the actual events or results of the games. It also skims over any controversy (such as NCAA investigation of violations and possible player criminal activities), focusing instead on Robinson’s modest, life-is-good perspective. Major social events, such as the civil rights movement, are presented as background only, since Robinson’s life was basically carried out in the community of Grambling. He wasn—t an active or vocal participant in any protest, but rather broke down barriers just by doing his job as best as he could and by instilling his values into his student players (“I learned I could accomplish more by working for change within the system rather than openly fighting against it,” he says). College football’s integration occurs through social change and through the evolution of television, the opportunities for black colleges to play in the classics, and because of Robinson’s ability to turn out talented players, many of whom became successful in the NFL, including Doug Williams, Willie Davis, and Willie Brown. What ultimately comes across in this autobiography are Robinson’s basic beliefs: love of family (he is extremely devoted to his wife, Doris), love of country, love of the game, and commitment to responsibility. While one is treated here to Robinson’s genial personality, the beloved coach is too humble to dwell on his accomplishments, so readers will have to find other sources to detail Robinson’s true significance for the game. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-24224-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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