Good reading to prep for the 2018 season, which many Cowboys-watchers are calling a make-or-break—though who gets made and...
“Love ’em or hate ’em a lot, ambivalence is not on the menu”: a warts-and-all portrait of the storied football club that refuses to give in.
They’ve long been called “America’s team,” much to the chagrin of every other NFL franchise, and it seems fair to say that they’ve been reviled more than they’ve been loved, sometimes even in their hometown. New York Daily News NFL columnist Myers (My First Coach: Inspiring Stories of NFL Quarterbacks and Their Dads, 2017, etc.), who had the Cowboys beat for the Dallas Morning News for nearly four decades, has a more nuanced view of “Jerry’s World,” a franchise built on a huge gamble built in turn on a huge fortune—and one that has since turned into a vast marketing machine whose interests extend far beyond the gridiron. By the author’s account, it all hinges on Jerry Jones, who has never been afraid to make decisions that lost him a lot of fans, until, at least, those decisions turned out to be right, like canning longtime coaches and losing deadweight players. Jones has been as quick as Donald Trump to sue his fellow owners as well, making him persona non grata until, Myers writes, “he showed [them] the way to turn their franchises into ATM machines.” Though fond of sportswriting clichés and set pieces, the author sets up some nice battles, such as the one waged between Jones and coach Bill Parcells over “the mercurial and controversial wide receiver Terrell Owens," for whom Parcells had no use. It was one of the many clashes between Parcells and his boss, though, to hear Myers tell it, Parcells left after one flubbed play too many, with a Cowboys record that, to put it charitably, remains mixed.
Good reading to prep for the 2018 season, which many Cowboys-watchers are calling a make-or-break—though who gets made and who gets broken remains to be seen.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6234-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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