While the FBI investigation continues to play itself out in court, Sokolove’s welcome context could well influence the court...
Though focusing on one disgraced coach and his former program, this exposé shows just how wide and deep is the corruption corroding men’s college basketball.
The financial figures are staggering. The Louisville basketball program, the most profitable in the nation, generated $45.6 million in 2017, the year in which the third scandal under coach Rick Pitino cost him his job. Each year, March Madness alone generates “more than $10 billion” in wagers, and in 2017, the NCAA itself made more than $1 billion in revenue, much of it from TV rights. Even websites that report on recruiting “have been acquired by or merged with larger corporate partners in deals worth at least $300 million in total.” As New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sokolove (Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater, 2014, etc.) effectively puts in perspective, the scandal that cost Pitino his job and has kept a prize recruit from eligibility during his first two years in college involves only $100,000, less than a fifth of which was ever paid by the shoe company that was supposed to funnel it to the recruit’s father. There have been no criminal charges filed against Pitino or the recruit and no evidence that either had knowledge of the payments. Yet the author’s reporting makes it clear that Pitino knew more than he has been willing to admit about how the recruiting game is played. This is true of most big-time coaches and knowledgeable fans, who know about major corporations and fast-talking hustlers trying to get their hooks into promising players as young as grade school and steer them to colleges that have contractual ties with shoe companies. It’s “a climate of moral rot” that will exist as long as college basketball generates huge sums of money while those who play the game, often from underprivileged families, are supposed to receive nothing.
While the FBI investigation continues to play itself out in court, Sokolove’s welcome context could well influence the court of public opinion.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56327-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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 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
© Copyright 2026 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.
