A heartfelt, inspiring story of the world’s most unconventional soccer team.
One woman’s story of getting to know a legendary South African women’s soccer team.
Duffy’s story begins in Boston in 2010, when she eagerly awaited the start of the FIFA World Cup. Duffy, a 51-year-old self-proclaimed “soccer freak,” received an email from a friend telling her about a soccer team in rural South Africa made up entirely of grandmothers, all of whom were Black. Duffy, herself a member of a soccer team of older women in Massachusetts, impulsively wrote to Rebecca “Beka” Ntsanwisi, the founder of the Grannies (official team name: Vakhegula Vakhegula), asking if their two outfits could be official sister teams. She began corresponding with Beka and worked to bring Vakhegula Vakhegula to America for some exhibition play in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She eventually met her new sports idols and learned about some of their struggles with poor health, disapproving relatives, the search for sponsorships, and so on. Duffy adroitly balances her narrative among these different topics, from the backstories of the individual athletes to the challenges of the game itself. In warm prose, Duffy describes a world of soccer in South Africa that can still be deeply sexist, juxtaposing this state of affairs against the tremendous impact the Grannies have had within their country and beyond. Duffy also does an excellent job of capturing Beka’s wisdom. “If you want to succeed in life, you have to suffer,” the team matriarch says at one such point; “you cannot just climb a mountain without struggling.” Readers will find the Grannies’ story genuinely touching. “I have been a happy woman since I have been playing football,” says 67-year-old Norah Mtileni. “I am living so well. My soul has settled.” This is a sports story full of extraordinary achievement that will likely make “soccer freaks” out of quite a few readers.
A heartfelt, inspiring story of the world’s most unconventional soccer team.Pub Date: May 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781538170175
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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