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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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