Broadcaster McKay tells his story in a voice grown familiar from 30 years of ABC’s Wide World of Sports and 11 Olympic Games: unfailingly charming, friendly, noncombative. McKay grew up in Philadelphia and began his career as a police reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun, doing the odd radio or television spot. His 11-year stint with CBS in New York covering sports events—from roller derbies to horse races—wasn—t altogether happy; indeed, the period culminated with a —good old-fashioned nervous breakdown— in 1960. While covering the 1961 Masters Tournament, he got a call from ABC’s Roone Arledge asking if he would be interested in hosting —a summer replacement show— covering —a number of sports not normally seen on TV.— The show became the Wide World of Sports, still going strong. McKay decries the fact that the show would eventually become dominated by boxing—a sport he detests—and by the likes of daredevil Evel Knievel. But it is for his hosting of 11 summer and winter Olympic Games that McKay is best remembered, especially for his extraordinary coverage of the 1972 games at Munich when the Black September terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. —They—re all gone,— he intoned wearily, creating one of the saddest, most memorable moments in broadcast history. McKay devotes space to each of the Olympics he reported, from the 1960 Rome Olympics to the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. There are few surprises among the —heroes— he chooses to remember: Peggy Fleming, Bob Beamon, Bill Toomey, Franz Klammer, Bruce Jenner, Nadia Comaneci, Eric Heiden, Bill Johnson, etc. And his —McKay Rating— for the Best Golf Pro (Jack Nicklaus), Best Jockey (Bill Shoemaker), Best Race Car Driver (Jackie Stewart), and so on, won—t raise many arguments. But it’s nice to read his thoughts on them. A pleasant walk down memory lane with a genuinely decent man. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-525-94418-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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