Must reading for budding coaches and a solid work of sports biography.
Well-paced, anecdotal life of the great NFL coach by well-practiced biographer Ribowsky (In the Name of the Father: Family, Football, and the Manning Dynasty, 2018, etc.).
Don Shula (b. 1930) was an examplar of the working-class dream: A self-made, determined young man from the Rust Belt, a first-generation American with no advantages save for his athletic gifts makes good, and in the end, he grows wealthy. In the author’s opening note, he also emerges as a sharp judge of character. Offered a job coaching by then USFL team owner Donald Trump, he declined: “Moral: Shula was a very winning coach, and a very rich one, because he could take the measure of men he respected, and quickly discard those he didn’t.” Score one for Shula, whose early career as a coach was rocky but solid. He made a less-than-laughingstock team out of the hapless Baltimore Colts, for example, turning them into “blue-collar leviathans” but still coming up short come championship time. “Shula has the best winning record in football,” said one critic, “and the worst record in big games.” So it would remain, though Shula made a tough and tenacious team out of the Miami Dolphins, captained by the formidable Dan Marino—who, born at the tail end of the baby boom, is a touch too young to do much hard work supporting Ribowsky’s thesis that Shula flourished during a halcyon time for football, part of the sport’s “greatest generation.” While golden-boy players such as Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas take their places in these pages, whether as heroes or as bêtes noires, the best moments have a kind of workaday North Dallas Forty quality replete with sex, drugs, and ripping Howard Cosell’s toupee off his head. Ribowsky isn’t above a groaner of a cliché (“it was clear that what sustained him for so long wasn’t the sizzle, but the meat”), but for the most part, the prose holds up to gridiron rigors.
Must reading for budding coaches and a solid work of sports biography.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-460-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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 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
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