A stirring, if sometimes-hagiographic, dramatization of a storied career.
The legendary football coach wins NFL titles, promotes racial justice, and weathers a troubled marriage in this fictionalized portrait.
Brown’s narrative depicts Vince Lombardi as a strict disciplinarian while he was still in high school in New York City—“Shut up, you morons!” he bellows when left in charge of his classmates—and a larger-than-life presence. He’s an avid student of football during assistant-coaching gigs at West Point and with the New York Giants, but despairs of getting a head- coaching position because of anti-Italian bias. Finally, in 1959, he lands the top spot with perennial losers, the Green Bay Packers, and comes into his own as a football strategist and orator: “I say we roll up our sleeves, get down in the dirt, and revive this team,” he declaims to his new secretaries. He drives players with merciless drills and hectoring until they collapse or rebel: “Now this is the attitude I want to see!” he exults when an enraged offensive lineman attacks him. Lombardi also mentors Black recruits, prohibits displays of bigotry from his players, and bans them from patronizing segregated businesses. Brilliant results follow as the Packers win three conference championships and two Super Bowls over nine seasons. However, at home, he constantly bickers with his neglected, alcoholic wife, Marie. Brown’s rendition of Lombardi’s life stays close to the facts and the coach’s popular image as a prophet of competitiveness, teamwork, and character-building. The depiction of his marriage gives the work additional complexity; Lombardi’s a flawed husband and Marie’s an unsettled person who still lends her spouse vital support. Brown’s workmanlike prose occasionally strays into corniness, but he also delivers evocative game scenes—frigid players “moved like bison on frozen tundra with clouds of white escaping their nostrils”—and engrossing passages of Lombardian analysis: “There, see? The receiver blocks the cornerback and boom—the lead running back takes on the safety and the ball carrier runs to daylight.” Fans of football heroism and Lombardi’s strict ethos will be hooked.
A stirring, if sometimes-hagiographic, dramatization of a storied career.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-947431-40-9
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Barbera Foundation
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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