Must-read gossip for NFL junkies.
Ladies and gentlemen, the NFL, America’s “beautiful shit-show of a league.”
A football fan and chief national correspondent of the New York Times Magazine, Leibovich (Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles in Courage and Self-Delusion, 2014, etc.) spent four years immersed in the NFL’s “cultural hunger games,” interviewing owners, coaches, and players to trace how football has morphed from “being one of the most unifying institutions in America to the country’s most polarizing sports brand.” Still superpopular and profitable, the game’s present “moral and cultural moment” includes ball-tampering, child and domestic abuse, brain-disease deaths, and knee-taking during the national anthem. While exploring all of these, the author’s chief focus is on the owners and players, who, like the politicians he covers daily, are all part of “the same sitcom.” The 32 owners, typified by Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys (“rich, audacious, distracted, shameless”), are variously described as “aging show poodles,” “superrich postmenopausal dudes,” and “tycoons of enlarged ego, delusion, and prostate.” Jets owner Woody Johnson is “an overgrown third-grader who collects toy trains and rotten quarterbacks.” Leibovich gives lengthy treatment to Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and his suspension for allegedly using underinflated footballs in the 2015 AFC championship game. Wealthy, with a supermodel wife, Brady touts sustained peak performance with his TB12 business partner and bodywork guru Alex Guerrero and famously golfs with NFL owner–wannabe Donald Trump, whose anti-kneeling tweets have their own moments. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, much-harassed by fans, dodges the author’s questions and holes out watching league games on three TV sets in a man cave. Leibovich covers Super Bowl parties, the NFL draft, training camps, Hall of Fame inductions, and more. The “conservative, Republican, and nationalistic” NFL has mostly white fans (83 percent) and mostly black players (nearly 70 percent), he writes. However, the implications of that sociology—and the deep uncertainties facing the league—are lost amid the rollicking entertainment.
Must-read gossip for NFL junkies.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18542-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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