A positive though often blunt and unpleasant story of a man who has it all yet remains restive.
A staff writer for Forbes expands to full, generally flattering length a profile of Alabama football coach Nick Saban published in that magazine.
For this book, Burke, who has previous titles about both fishing and football (4th and Goal: One Man's Quest to Recapture His Dream, 2012, etc.), interviewed myriads of folks whom Saban has known—and not all are admirers. (The author spoke a number of times with Saban, as well.) Burke shows what he believes is the enormous influence of Saban’s father, charts his subject’s own modest athletic career, and then follows him through a most restless coaching career. Until the Alabama job (2007-present), Saban rarely stayed anywhere very long. College, the NFL, assistant coach, head coach—he moved around until he found a position where he had absolute control and where, as Burke points out, he collects millions of dollars each year in salary and incentives. Although the author clearly admires the accomplishments of his subject, he continually notes the traits of Saban that many (non–football fans) might find troubling. He rarely sees his family (he does phone his wife every day, writes Burke), evinces no enduring pleasure in even the most significant wins (his teams have won four national championships—one was with LSU), has a fiery temper (Burke calls him “livid” more than once and describes testosterone-soaked basketball games/fistfights with his coaching staff), demands absolute loyalty, weeps occasionally, and is fundamentally humorless. However, the coach unquestionably possesses an Ahab-ian focus, and he has perhaps only one true peer when it comes to recruiting (Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer). Some have called him “The Lord of the Living Room” because of his persuasiveness. Burke muses near the end about what would have happened if Saban had focused his talents on some more serious social need.
A positive though often blunt and unpleasant story of a man who has it all yet remains restive.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8993-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
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
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