A must for Packers fan and a worthwhile read for football enthusiasts in general.
An illustrated history of one of professional football’s most storied franchises.
On Sept. 14, 1919, the Green Bay Packers played their first game in front of approximately 1,500 people. The spectators were separated from the field by rope, and team co-founder George Whitney Calhoun passed a hat among them for donations. A century later, Forbes values the Packers at more than $2.5 billion, the team’s stadium has a capacity of 81,441, and every home game since 1960 has sold out. In his second book, Beech (When Saturday Mattered Most: The Last Golden Season of Army Football, 2012), a senior editor at the Players’ Tribune and a former writer for Sports Illustrated, convincingly argues that through lean times (one playoff appearance between 1972 and 1994) and glory years (13 league championships, including three straight from both 1929 to 1931 and 1965 to 1967), the people of Green Bay have provided financial and moral support to their beloved squad, the NFL’s only publicly owned team. Biographical sketches of the team’s most prominent figures enhance the narrative, as do many intriguing factoids—e.g., devout Catholic and legendary coach Vince Lombardi disliked the philandering Curly Lambeau, the team’s co-founder and stadium namesake, and Green Bay was the nation’s leading producer of toilet paper, an industry that helped spare the city from the worst effects of the Great Depression. Beech fumbles only occasionally: He lists Super Bowl XLV between the Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers as “Super Bowl XVL.” Brett Favre’s freshman year at Southern Mississippi University was 1987, not 1990. The author’s assertion that the 1967 NFL championship game between the Packers and the Dallas Cowboys remains “the coldest game ever played” is debatable; the 1981 AFC championship game in Cincinnati represents the coldest temperature in NFL game history in terms of wind chill. But these are minor quibbles with an overall illuminating sports narrative.
A must for Packers fan and a worthwhile read for football enthusiasts in general.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-46013-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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