Balanced and intelligent, this is the first biography of the legendary University of Alabama football coach since his death early in 1983, written by a contributor to the Birmingham Post-Herald who interviewed Bryant for his high school paper. Bryant really was a larger-than-life figure, almost literally. At 6' 3' and 210 pounds, he wasn't much smaller than John Wayne, to whom many of players compared him. His physical size would help extricate him from a life of poverty and hard labor, making him an asset to his high school football team and leading him to an athletic scholarship at the University of Alabama. Bryant played with an intensity that overrode his occasional awkwardness. He was the kind of athlete who, despite a broken leg, would suit up and play against hated rival Tennessee. As a coach, he would encourage the same kind of dedication in his players. Bryant was the last of a kind: the coach as absolute monarch, ruler of all he surveyed from his famous tower overlooking the 'Bama practice field. Dunnavant retells all the familiar stories from Bryant's career as the winningest major-college head coach: his resignation from Maryland after the university's president ordered the return of a player he had disciplined; his fabled first season at Texas A&M, in which he ran off all but 29 prospective players with a diet of two hard practices a day in the desert heat; his battles with the press in two libel suits; his extraordinary string of successes at his alma mater. Dunnavant labors mightily to keep the book balanced. He talks about Bryant's excessive drinking, his recognition in later years that the super-tough discipline of his early days might not be applicable in the Vietnam War era, the occasional coaching mistake that cost a team a victory. But Dunnavant can't find feet of clay in this hero, nor does he look especially hard. It's just as well, because they probably aren't there.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-80041-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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