A wide-ranging, personal book that addresses may different aspects of high school sports.
Debut author Roth, a former high school coach and sports administrator with decades of experience, offers amusing and enlightening remembrances, a brief history of high school athletics in the United States, and tips for coaches, parents, officials, and players.
Over the course of this work, the author, who coached a few different sports in Westchester, New York, comes across as tough but caring. He preaches discipline for athletes throughout, for example, but he also shows a clear distaste for coaches who curse out their players and embarrass them in public. Roth writes that he believes that players should be well-rounded individuals; for instance, he tells of how he once instituted a mandatory study hall for his players before practices, both to allow a girls’ team early access to the gym and to make sure his athletes were on track academically. He also effectively addresses broader issues in a clear, impartial manner. Not all schools have academic requirements for their athletes, but Roth places a high value on education, often stating that coaches should be teachers first and take interest in their students’ everyday lives. On the other hand, he points out that sometimes players don’t excel in academics, and playing a sport provides their main means of socialization. At one point, he asks parents to resist the temptation to send coaches abusive emails when they don’t think their kid is getting enough playing time; at another, he reminds players they owe their coach a commitment to the rules. Another general rule of Roth’s is that winning is important, especially at the varsity level, but it’s not the only important goal. Overall, the author is mostly successful at combining memoir, history, and self-help, finding an effective balance while often speaking of his own personal experiences. That said, however, readers with only a casual interest in high school sports may find themselves drifting in parts. Also, some of the stories here are more instructive than entertaining, such as one about a coach getting ejected from a game for swearing at an official.
A wide-ranging, personal book that addresses may different aspects of high school sports.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4083-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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