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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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