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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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