An engaging and informative cultural history, on and off the gridiron.
A rich history of the rise of the National Football League from its virtual obscurity at its genesis in the 1920s to its position as an economic and cultural powerhouse today.
Former Baltimore Sun sportswriter Eisenberg (The Streak: Lou Gehrig, Cal Ripken Jr., and Baseball's Most Historic Record, 2017, etc.) returns with the story of how five owners—George Halas, Bert Bell, George Preston Marshall, Art Rooney, and Tim Mara—refused to give up on the struggling league and lived to see (and cause) its current dominance. Thoroughly researched and gracefully told, the story begins with the background of each of the five, then moves chronologically through the early years of the league—struggles, controversies (among the most significant was the arrival of black players), adjustments (to radio and then TV)—to its full arrival in 1958, when 40 million people watched the Baltimore Colts defeat the New York Giants in the exciting championship game. As the author repeatedly points out, these five were fierce rivals, but they knew that to make the league survive and flourish, they could not destroy one another. So they compromised and changed rules to make the game more exciting; all would live to see the league’s vigorous health. (The final chapter deals with the deaths of each.) Although Eisenberg is admiring of the founders, he also recognizes—and highlights—their weaknesses. Marshall, for example, was a racist, the last to bring blacks onto his team, the Washington Redskins. Although the author provides some details about some key games (and iconic players like Red Grange, Marion Motley, and Sam Huff), the narrative is not a rehearsal of games but of the history of a game, a business, and five men who took a chance, lost money, and then found great success.
An engaging and informative cultural history, on and off the gridiron.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-465-04870-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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