For readers seeking a pep talk in the place of more thoughtful psychological analysis.
A blustering, often tedious self-help book by the Fox Sports NFL insider.
“Stand the fuck out!” shouts Glazer, who seeks to address issues of self-doubt and existential angst. What he offers is mostly a locker-room harangue—perhaps useful if you’re an NFL pro, less so if you’re an ordinary mortal. Much of the material is unobjectionable enough—e.g., “Be the last one standing,” meaning that one shouldn’t ever give up in the arena of trying to impress someone such as a prospective client or boss with one’s dedication and brilliance. That’s all well and good, if a bit off point. More in keeping with the subtitle are Glazer’s recollections of starting off in the sports business, which found him often so poor that he had to beg a ride to the stadium. “Sometimes I needed a free meal,” he allows. “Always, I needed to know people had my back.” The quid pro quo there is that one needs to have others’ backs as well, which leads Glazer to insist on the importance of both loyalty and cultivating relationships. In that regard, aspiring journalists may gain insight from his welcome self-evaluation as someone who can’t outplay his subjects but who can certainly befriend them and, through those friendships, learn about what happens in the huddle. Sometimes Glazer can be cloying: As a motivational speaker and coach, it seems he likes nothing better than to induce tears. He also enjoys profanity-laced exhortation, as when he told a badly wounded, depressed combat veteran, “Here is what I want you to do: from now on, when you are walking down the street, I want you to hold your head high and look at every fucking person you see out there and say to yourself, ‘I ain’t like the rest of you motherfuckers’….You saved American POWs. You ain’t like everybody else.”
For readers seeking a pep talk in the place of more thoughtful psychological analysis.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-306285-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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
PERSPECTIVES
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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