Will surprise even those who think they know the game.
First-time author Greenberg chronicles the overlooked football career of one of the sport’s genuine innovators.
Just as Paul Arizin’s perfection of the jump shot changed the game of basketball, Benny Friedman’s invention of the forward pass changed football. During the sport’s first Golden Age, when names like Grange, Nevers and Nagurski glittered, and the melon-sized ball made it difficult and the rules made it risky, the forward pass played a distinctly minor role in any team’s offense. Under Michigan’s legendary coach Fielding Yost, Friedman, a fitness fanatic, used his strength and accuracy to do unprecedented things with the ball. Named to the 1925 All-America team for his trademark passing, trick plays and lightning strikes, he became a Jewish sports icon, second only to boxer Benny Leonard. Friedman repeated his college success in the nascent professional game, leading the league in 1928 in both passing and rushing touchdowns, a feat never accomplished before or since. Giants’ owner Tim Mara purchased the entire Detroit Wolverines team just to get Friedman to New York, where his ethnicity and exciting brand of play had special box-office appeal. In college Friedman played in the first game ever broadcast live on radio. In a special pro exhibition he played and starred in the final game Knute Rockne ever coached. After arguably saving pro ball in the nation’s largest city, Friedman went on to a modestly successful coaching career, reviving the football program at CCNY and inaugurating one at Brandeis University. Greenberg capably negotiates the on-field exploits of this football pioneer, explaining Friedman’s athletic brilliance and importance, but the author doesn’t quite penetrate the carapace of the aloof man that George Halas said “revolutionized football.” After a series of debilitating operations and illnesses, Friedman took his own life in 1982. He was belatedly elected to the Hall of Fame in 2005, a snub some attributed to anti-Semitism, others to electors offended by Friedman’s unseemly campaign for the honor. Regardless, Greenberg sets an unimpeachable case on behalf of this essentially unknowable man.
Will surprise even those who think they know the game.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-477-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
