A vigorously told story of the battle for equity on the gridiron, a battle that is still playing out.
A history of the agonizingly slow acceptance of Black quarterbacks in professional football.
Who recognizes the name Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard? A Black Illinoisan born in 1895, Pollard was taught by his parents “to interact respectfully with whites but also to stand up for themselves when necessary.” As veteran sportswriter Eisenberg notes, he later became “the NFL’s first Black quarterback” as well as “the first Black player to participate in the game that became known as the Rose Bowl…and the first Black head coach in the NFL.” Pollard is not better known because after his time on the field, which ended in the mid-1920s, Black players were frozen out of the game, “and by the time the tiniest trickle of Black players resurfaced after World War II, the quarterback position had evolved, emerging as football’s most glamorous and complex role, deemed so important and challenging that owners and coaches would not dare trust a Black man with it.” That lack of trust was born of pure racism, of course, and the unfounded assumption that Black players lacked the intelligence to captain a team. Eventually, players such as Buffalo’s James Harris proved that assumption wrong—though Harris, a star college player, was selected No. 148th in the NFL draft, “a slap in the face.” Finally, in 1974, then with the Los Angeles Rams, Harris “became the first Black quarterback to start an NFL playoff game.” It would be another decade before two Black quarterbacks faced each other. Two decades after that, when Michael Vick ran afoul of the law, Black players were again effectively frozen out of the position. Now, of course, the situation has changed utterly: Aaron Rodgers, Eisenberg points out, is the NFL’s highest-paid player, but after him come four "Black quarterbacks with contracts worth more than $1 billion combined.”
A vigorously told story of the battle for equity on the gridiron, a battle that is still playing out.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781541600409
Page Count: 416
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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