Though not without its flaws, Pearlman’s book is a complete, satisfying biography of a gunslinger who, for both better and...
A warts-and-all biography of one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.
Brett Favre is an icon in the football world, a player who was almost universally described as a “gunslinger” for his risky, sometimes-reckless, sometimes-inspired style of play. As veteran sports biographer Pearlman (Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, 2014, etc.)—who has made a career of chronicling the vibrant, controversial, and sometimes-unsavory aspects of the NFL’s recent history—shows, the gunslinger mentality extended to Favre’s off-the-field behavior. In the popular imagination, Favre is an aw-shucks good ole’ boy, a small-town Mississippian whose playing style evoked a childlike love for the game. Yet in this more rounded—and some might say prurient—portrait, Favre was a serial philanderer and problem drinker whose well-known problem with painkillers went far deeper than most observers understood. Playing in isolated Green Bay, Wisconsin, meant that a pliable local media most often covered up Favre’s excesses, which almost certainly would have been revealed in a more competitive media market. Pearlman’s writing is brisk and generally readable, though the book is occasionally marred by clunky prose. Furthermore, while biographers should avoid hagiography, one wonders if the depth of exploration of Favre’s faithlessness to his wife, Deanna (who ends up as the story’s martyr), or his sometimes-unkind treatment of his father, Irv, is necessary. The author ends up asserting that Favre was both a football icon and a flawed human being, hardly a revolutionary conclusion. Nonetheless, this is the deepest understanding we are likely to have of Favre for quite some time.
Though not without its flaws, Pearlman’s book is a complete, satisfying biography of a gunslinger who, for both better and worse, was far more complex than most fans have understood.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-45437-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
SEEN & HEARD
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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