A deeply reported, sensitively rendered story that avoids cliché and persuades us that there might indeed be such a thing as...
A longtime journalist for Sports Illustrated looks back at the tornado that devastated Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and the football team that helped the town heal.
On April 27, 2011, “one of the deadliest [tornadoes] in the history of the South” touched down in the state’s fifth-largest city, destroying more than 5,700 homes and businesses, taking 7,000 jobs, killing 53, injuring thousands and leaving almost no one unaffected. Anderson (The First Star: Red Grange and the Barnstorming Tour That Launched the NFL, 2009, etc.) spends the opening chapters setting the scene for that awful day, introducing most of the people whose stories unfold at greater length as he charts the next 12 months at the University of Alabama and in this tightknit town forever altered by the whirlwind. It’s a two-pronged tale: the cleanup and rebuilding of T-town, including the slow recovery of some who lost loved ones, and the help and inspiration supplied by the Crimson Tide football team that went on to win the national championship. Players and coaches spent the summer working with citizens on relief efforts, reassuring victims, raising funds and rallying National Guard troops. In the process, they developed extraordinary team chemistry and the conviction that they were playing for something bigger than themselves. Readers understandably weary of the redemption-through-sports theme should know that it works spectacularly well here. First, in football-crazed Alabama, passion for the sport and respect for players and coaches run deep. Anderson supplies just enough explanatory material about the Tide’s history, its fabled coaches and honored traditions to demonstrate how Nick Saban and his players were perfectly poised to assume an important leadership role. Second, the author wisely touches only lightly on the games, focusing instead on the team’s bond with the community and the genuine solace offered in the face of inexplicable tragedy.
A deeply reported, sensitively rendered story that avoids cliché and persuades us that there might indeed be such a thing as “football therapy.”Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61893-097-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sports Illustrated Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.
An account of the mysterious life of eels that also serves as a meditation on consciousness, faith, time, light and darkness, and life and death.
In addition to an intriguing natural history, Swedish journalist Svensson includes a highly personal account of his relationship with his father. The author alternates eel-focused chapters with those about his father, a man obsessed with fishing for this elusive creature. “I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream,” he writes. “I can’t remember us speaking at all….Because we were in…a place whose nature was best enjoyed in silence.” Throughout, Svensson, whose beat is not biology but art and culture, fills his account with people: Aristotle, who thought eels emerged live from mud, “like a slithering, enigmatic miracle”; Freud, who as a teenage biologist spent months in Trieste, Italy, peering through a microscope searching vainly for eel testes; Johannes Schmidt, who for two decades tracked thousands of eels, looking for their breeding grounds. After recounting the details of the eel life cycle, the author turns to the eel in literature—e.g., in the Bible, Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, and Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum—and history. He notes that the Puritans would likely not have survived without eels, and he explores Sweden’s “eel coast” (what it once was and how it has changed), how eel fishing became embroiled in the Northern Irish conflict, and the importance of eel fishing to the Basque separatist movement. The apparent return to life of a dead eel leads Svensson to a consideration of faith and the inherent message of miracles. He warns that if we are to save this fascinating creature from extinction, we must continue to study it. His book is a highly readable place to begin learning.
Unsentimental nature writing that sheds as much light on humans as on eels.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296881-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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