Finebaum is articulate and knows his football, though this book is just more candy for his admirers and grist for the mills...
A pedal-to-the-metal survey of SEC football.
Radio and TV sports personality Finebaum is known as the “Mouth of the South,” and for the first few pages, his local boosterism and sheer windbaggery will make readers understand why his title comes with capital letters: “The SEC is college football’s version of Rome, the center of the football universe. Long may it rule.” Given the past 10-plus years in college football, it may be hard to argue with him on that note. When he comes out with “the most meaningful traditions,” readers may have already had enough, but then another note creeps in—“the most decadent football stadiums…the most obscene operating budgets…the kind of personal scandals that give TMZ a reason to live…the most obnoxiously large marching bands"—and you realize that the Mouth has a Tongue that is at least partly in Cheek. Wade through the logorrhea, and plenty of worthy football nuggets and insights become evident. Finebaum presents a sharp profile of Texas A&M and many chromatic vignettes of other football towns. The author also picks coaches apart. Of legendary Alabama coach Bear Bryant, he writes, “I couldn’t understand a word he said. It was as if he were speaking in tongues.” And former Florida and current Ohio State coach Urban Meyer: “a good and decent person underneath the steely demeanor. Don’t misunderstand me: I wouldn’t want to go on an Alaskan cruise with him.” For all Finebaum’s ego and opinions, there is plenty of false modesty. As a TV commentator, he writes, “I was born with the facial elasticity of an IRS auditor.” The author is always well-informed and plenty happy to deliver judgment: “Clemson is always good for at least one inexplicable letdown per season.”
Finebaum is articulate and knows his football, though this book is just more candy for his admirers and grist for the mills of his detractors.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229741-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
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