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
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
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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
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