Although the text benefits from the author’s deep knowledge of the game—and from many important interviews—excessive...
ESPN NFL reporter Trotter debuts with a very sympathetic account of the life of NFL Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau (1969-2012).
The author has few negative things to say in this highly conventional biography—even the linebacker’s arrest for domestic abuse in 2010 receives a walking-on-eggshells treatment. The author begins by observing, “we don’t really know our athletic heroes,” and proceeds to show us many of Seau’s hidden facets, although a number of key individuals (his partying buddies) declined to be interviewed. Trotter gives us details about Seau’s Samoan heritage and then takes us through his school days (with a 3.6 academic average in high school, he could not manage a decent score on the SAT), his athletic dominance at all levels, his ferocious work ethic, and his determination to play with pain. We also learn about his family life—womanizing, partying, and gambling eventually caused numerous estrangements—and his financial collapse after he retired. Trotter shows us a player honored by his high school, college, and pro teammates, coaches, and fans. He was deeply respected not just for his athletic gifts, but also for his sense of humor and his leadership. The author doesn’t give too many detailed accounts of games—just key plays and moments. He also pauses occasionally to expatiate on head injuries, alcoholism, drug use, and, of course, evanescent fame. Unfortunately, the author falls victim too often to cliché (“Fear was not in his vocabulary”; “he won her heart with his kindness”; “His star could not have been brighter”). Deeply invested in Seau’s sad story, Trotter also overstates the effect of his suicide in 2012, observing that sadness swept the land.
Although the text benefits from the author’s deep knowledge of the game—and from many important interviews—excessive sentiment corrodes.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-23617-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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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