NFL crazies will eat this like snack food; more serious readers will shun the empty calories.
A one-time superagent—whose exploits informed the film Jerry Maguire— rehearses his rise, fall and struggles to recover.
Once upon a time, Steinberg (Winning with Integrity: Getting What You're Worth Without Selling Your Soul, 1998) and his agency represented some of the most stellar names in the NFL sky—quarterbacks Warren Moon, Steve Young and Troy Aikman among them. The narrative commences at the 2006 NFL Hall of Fame inductions, when Moon and Aikman were inducted. We then swoop back to 1949 and his birth, boyhood in Los Angeles and the news that his IQ ranks with Einstein’s. (Humility is not a hallmark of Steinberg’s prose—though it does appear near the end.) We follow him to Berkeley (where he continued through law school) and his decision to become a sports agent due to his friendship with quarterback Steve Bartkowski. He negotiated a good deal for his friend, and off he went on his rocket ride to celebrity. It wasn’t long before he was wheeling and dealing and negotiating multimillion-dollar deals for his clients, living high in the hills above the Bay, schmoozing with celebrities of all sorts. Steinberg says he sought character in his clients—and, notably, admirably, urged them to contribute in various ways to charities. He alludes several times to some nastiness in his profession—jealousy, racism (especially the NFL’s dilatory ways vis-à-vis black quarterbacks) and self-absorbed athletes (not entirely their faults). The narrative suffers from some cheesy “guess-what’s-gonna-happen-next?” sentences at the ends of many chapters and from the author’s failure to explore more thoroughly and reflectively his personal weaknesses—alcohol being the principal one. Yes, we read a little about his depressions and his rehab experiences but all in a breezy, “that’s-all-behind-me-now” fashion.
NFL crazies will eat this like snack food; more serious readers will shun the empty calories.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03042-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
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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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