Like the man himself, this long-awaited memoir by football Hall-of-Famer and broadcaster Gifford is a measured, straightforward, good-natured piece of work. With the help of Newsweek's Waters, Gifford (12 years in the NFL, All-Pro at three positions) looks back on 40 years of football and celebrity with ``awe and gratitude.'' He opens characteristically, with a humbling experience: the New York Giants' loss in the 1958 title game to Baltimore, when he fumbled twice, both fumbles leading to Colts touchdowns. Despite his NFL achievements, short-lived acting career, and longtime marriage to TV-star Kathie Lee Gifford, the author's 23 years on Monday Night Football are of greatest interest here, and he devotes ample space to them. Gifford writes compassionately of Howard Cosell despite the elder sportscaster having ``bad-mouthed me'' and ``carved me up in his books,'' and he calls his good friend Don Meredith ``one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet'' in spite of Meredith's TV-cultivated image as a good ol' boy. Gifford names current partner Al Michaels as ``the best play-by-play man in the business,'' and Dan Dierdorf as ``the only former lineman I've ever met who knows the entire game'' of football. Looking back on his playing days, the author cites as highlights his 1956 MVP season, when the Giants won it all, and the championship teams of the early 1960's. He also provides an amusing recounting of the famous hit laid on him in 1960 by Philadelphia linebacker Chuck Bednarik, which resulted in ``a deep brain concussion.'' Profiles of Vince Lombardi, Paul Brown, and former teammates Sam Huff, Y.A. Tittle, Charlie Conerly, and Kyle Rote paint a vivid picture of the era, as do Gifford's reminiscences of late 1950's New York nightlife. Charming and appealing...nicely done, with barely a touch of vitriol. (Photographs)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41543-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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BOOK REVIEW
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