Soccer has taken its place in the American sporting constellation in no small part due to fans and writers like Agovino.
One man’s experience of American soccer’s years of bust and boom.
As a teenager, Agovino (The Bookmaker: A Memoir of Money, Luck, and Family from the Utopian Outskirts of New York City, 2008) fell in love with the beautiful game. Born and bred in the Bronx, where the typical American team sports of baseball, football, basketball and hockey reigned, the author nonetheless found himself captivated by a game that most Americans disdained when they acknowledged it at all. By 1982, when Agovino attended his first real soccer match, an all-star game at Giants Stadium featuring some of the world’s elite players, the luster of the North American Soccer League’s New York Cosmos was fading and the United States men’s national team had not made the World Cup since 1950 (and would not do so until 1990). Agovino played for his high school team, went on to New York University, where he covered the varsity team for the school paper, and upon graduation, found a series of jobs in journalism and as a freelance writer covering soccer as much as he was able. Agovino’s passion rings clear throughout this well-written book, but it is difficult to discern his intended audience. His personal journey through the sport is idiosyncratic, and the book is neither a history nor a traditional memoir—though it is closer to the latter than the former. Newcomers to the sport may find themselves a bit lost, and while the author purports to hate a common breed of exclusive and elitist American soccer fans, he betrays his own version of off-putting elitism and condescension. Nonetheless, those readers who buy in will see the growth of soccer in the United States in a deeply felt, personal journey.
Soccer has taken its place in the American sporting constellation in no small part due to fans and writers like Agovino.Pub Date: June 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4047-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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