The book has its moments, but not enough to overcome Ribowsky’s flubs and irksome penchant for mockery.
An in-depth look at American football royalty.
The Manning quarterbacking family has figured prominently in the nation’s football landscape for nearly 50 years. In his latest book, veteran biographer Ribowsky (Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams, 2016, etc.) chronicles the careers of father Archie and sons Peyton and Eli. The author draws interesting comparisons between the obsessive, publicity-hungry Peyton and the quiet, phlegmatic Eli. Whereas the former has superior statistics and will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer, the latter has just as many Super Bowl wins (two) and a reputation as a better performer in the clutch. Ribowsky also illustrates how Archie, whose father committed suicide, made a point to be more invested in the lives of his children. Unfortunately, in telling this family history through the conduit of the American South and race, the author never misses an opportunity to take cheap shots at the protagonists. Thus he accuses Archie of “racism acceptance,” adding that while there is no evidence that the Mannings of Drew, Mississippi (where Archie grew up), joined the Ku Klux Klan, “neither is there any reason to believe they opposed” it. Ribowsky also wields his acerbic pen against Manning contemporaries: Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan is a “choker,” while the decision of University of Florida star Danny Wuerffel to decline a spot on Playboy’s All-America team was nothing but “self-serving treacle.” Moreover, the author’s put-downs are compounded by numerous errors. Texas Western won the NCAA men’s basketball championship in 1966, not 1965. Ryan Zimmerman plays for the Washington Nationals, not the Philadelphia Phillies. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. occurred before that of Robert F. Kennedy, not after. When President Barack Obama called Peyton following the latter’s loss in the Super Bowl, Obama was in office for more than a year, not “weeks into his first term.”
The book has its moments, but not enough to overcome Ribowsky’s flubs and irksome penchant for mockery.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63149-309-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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