Basketball fans are not the only readers who will be edified by this significant slice of New York City history.
A college basketball Cinderella story that turned into a scandalous tale.
The 1949-1950 City College team achieved a feat no other has or almost certainly ever will: The Beavers won the NCAA and the National Invitational Tournament in the same season. This double national championship run was improbable in part because the parochial, academic-focused college in Manhattan consisted of African American and Jewish players in an otherwise mostly segregated, WASPy sports world. However, even years after the Beavers’ legendary season, the team would come to be viewed as more infamous than famous, as prominent City College players admitted to accepting bribes from gamblers to shave points during games in that and the subsequently tumultuous 1951-1952 season. Goodman (Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World, 2013, etc.) takes on the story more as a historian than sportswriter, and readers will be grateful for that. The author describes much of the on-court play-by-play with hackneyed language common for the genre. The notable exception is a memorable chapter on the Beavers’ defeat of the University of Kentucky, coached by segregationist Adolph Rupp, who once said, “the Lord never meant for a white boy to play with a colored boy…else he wouldn’t have painted them different colors.” Most of the riveting action unfolds outside the arena, in the halls of government and through the hands of bookies; here, Goodman is at his scene-setting best. While he occasionally provides more detail than is necessary, he smoothly shapes readable narratives of a deep roster of characters, including coaches (Goodman paints Hall of Fame head coach Nat Holman as a hands-off figurehead and assistant Bobby Sand as a sympathetic workhorse), politicians, police, detectives, organized criminals, and, of course, players (with focus on the lives and achievements of Eddie Roman, Ed Warner, and Floyd Lane).
Basketball fans are not the only readers who will be edified by this significant slice of New York City history.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-88283-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will...
A stunningly crafted and unsparing account of the author’s rape as a college freshman and what it took to win her case in court.
In 1981, Sebold was brutally raped on her college campus, at Syracuse University. Sebold, a New York Times Magazinecontributor, now in her 30s, reconstructs the rape and the year following in which her assailant was brought to trial and found guilty. When, months after the rape, she confided in her fiction professor, Tobias Wolff, he advised: “Try, if you can, to remember everything.” Sebold heeded his words, and the result is a memoir that reads like detective fiction, replete with police jargon, economical characterization, and film-like scene construction. Part of Sebold’s ironic luck, besides the fact that she wasn’t killed, was that she was a virgin prior to the rape, she was wearing bulky clothing, and her rapist beat her, leaving unmistakable evidence of violence. Sebold casts a cool eye on these facts: “The cosmetics of rape are central to proving any case.” Sebold critiques the sexism and misconceptions surrounding rape with neither rhetoric nor apology; she lets her experience speak for itself. Her family, her friends, her campus community are all shaken by the brutality she survived, yet Sebold finds herself feeling more affinity with police officers she meets, as it was “in [their] world where this hideous thing had happened to me. A world of violent crime.” Just when Sebold believes she might surface from this world, a close friend is raped and the haunting continues. The last section, “Aftermath,” has an unavoidable tacked-on-at-the-end feel, as Sebold crams over a decade’s worth of coping and healing into a short chapter.
Told with mettle and intelligence, Sebold’s story of fierce determination to wrest back her life from her rapist will inspire and challenge.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85782-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
