A rich if esoteric look at the NFL’s first real rivalry.
Ziemba unearths the origins of football’s longest-running feud in this work of sports history.
Few now remember that the oldest rivalry in the National Football League was originally of the cross-town variety: the Bears originally played at Wrigley Field on the North Side of Chicago, and the South Side was home to the earlier established Chicago Cardinals. For nearly 40 years, from 1920 to 1959, these two teams—the only surviving members of the original NFL—battled it out during what were arguably the most colorful decades of the sport’s history (the intra-city dimension of the rivalry ended when the Cardinals moved to St. Louis for the 1960 season). With this book, Ziemba endeavors to piece together the specifics of that rivalry, the facts of which are muddled by destroyed records, hazy memories, and plenty of folklore. It’s a history littered with spectacular games (from the nail-bitingly close to the comically one-sided), long-forgotten teams (including the Pottsville Maroons and the Dayton Triangles), and an absurd number of fistfights. At the center of the rivalry were two giants of football history: the Cardinals’ Chris O’Brien and the Bears’ George Halas, men who not only founded and owned their respective teams but who helped create the NFL itself. Ziemba does a hasty job framing his narrative, jumping into the minutia with little in the way of introduction for readers not ensconced in NFL history. He writes action well, though, as here during a Thanksgiving Day matchup in 1922: “By this time, mayhem had ensued on the field as opposing players, fans, and police were all involved in the fracas…Briefly, order was restored, until the officials announced that only Driscoll had been tossed from the game for his role in the fisticuffs. Enraged, Driscoll returned to the fray along with dozens of other fans…” Less for the general reader than for those invested in the early days of Chicago football, the book is a treasure trove of lost trivia and recovered accounts from a very different era in gridiron history.
A rich if esoteric look at the NFL’s first real rivalry.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1476688510
Page Count: 348
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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