Unfocused and repetitive, though the Mites’ story is inspiring.
The latest work from Dent (Monster of the Midway, 2003, etc.) describes the rise of a group of orphans who defied the odds to become a power in Texas high-school football.
The parentless denizens of the Masonic Home in Fort Worth were looked down on by many of their neighbors as second-class citizens. Their status changed in 1927, however, with the arrival of Rusty Russell, a visionary young coach determined to make his mark on the high-school football landscape. An unassuming World War I veteran, Russell was confident he could make his players winners despite the fact that they were severely undersized, giving up inches and pounds at every position (hence the nickname “Mighty Mites”). Faced with a student body that barely exceeded 100 and a team of only 12 players, Russell countered with a 700-page playbook and the determination of his players to prove their doubters wrong. In only five years, Russell built the team into a powerhouse that clawed its way to the Texas high-school championship game. Outweighed and out-manned, the Mighty Mites would remain one of the state’s elite football teams for the next dozen years. But they never won a championship, and lacking such a ready-made climax, the narrative meanders. Dent describes many seasons and provides a great amount of detail about individual games; he also profiles some of the team’s more talented stars. (Hardy Brown, later feared as one of the NFL’s most violent players, joined the Masonic Home after seeing his father, a bootlegger, murdered by rivals.) The author clearly intends this to be an uplifting Depression-era sports tale similar to those of racehorse Seabiscuit or boxer James Braddock. However, since the Mighty Mites didn’t capture the same kind of national attention, the level of detail seems excessive.
Unfocused and repetitive, though the Mites’ story is inspiring.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-30872-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
BOOK TO SCREEN
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich...
A reflective and entertaining journey through Japan, as the author seeks to reconnect with his martial arts sensei.
Lowry is a student of koryu (not to be confused with kendo), a style of Japanese classical swordsmanship. Koryu is a medieval art, like Noh and the tea ceremony, a style of combat born on the battlefield–but more importantly, it’s a way to address the world (though an esoteric one: Lowry may well be the only American practicing the art in the United States). Indeed, present-day practitioners refrain from exercising its fatal possibilities. Lowry’s sensei left the U.S. to return to Japan, urging Lowry to follow. Though his life headed in a different direction, he never forgot his training–when the time was ripe, he journeyed to Japan to join his sensei. The narrative revolves around this pivotal decision, and it provides a warm center from which the author expounds on such topics as the glories of a Japanese bath; the evolution of the Samurai caste; the peculiarities of Japanese landscape architecture; the elements of proper sandal-tying; the custom of the premarital shenanigans called yobai; and the teachings of mikkyo Buddhism. He also includes the vital story of the sword–what it reveals about Japanese life and technology, social structure and aesthetic values, etiquette, apprenticeship and the process of education. Lowry’s seriousness lends an earnest cast to the proceedings, but he’s not without a sense of humor–commenting upon his accomplished slurping of noodles, a friend’s wife notes, “He really sucks!”
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich tradition.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-890536-10-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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