A St. Bonaventure alumnus and faculty member chronicles the school’s basketball scandal.
Scandals in college athletics are almost a blip in today’s world of rapid telecommunications and cynicism. Wieland, who now serves as a lecturer in the school’s Journalism and Mass Communications department, seems to acknowledge this reality, but he also internalizes “a college’s basketball disaster.” It is the author’s closeness to the characters and setting that puts a face on an issue that almost seems to be something new. Wieland relates how an idyllic Franciscan university got swept up in the commonplace reality of money. The details of the story are fascinating, but perhaps not for the reasons one might expect. The reader is not inundated with the seemingly lavish aspects of big-time college sports, but rather the mundane pieces of daily academics and school survival. The book’s theme revolves around the changing of a single grade of a single student basketball player. The involvement of many individuals, their actions and their conflicting accounts of those actions sometimes read like a TV crime drama, one that poses the question of what really happened. What really happened is fairly clear to Wieland, however, and he pulls no punches in his criticisms. The chapters on the school president’s apparent boondoggle land purchase or salaries sometimes seem like gossipy payback. His recollections create unmistakable good guys and bad guys. Those same recollections, though, could still leave the reader doubting. That is because Wieland is a journalist who writes like a journalist. He bases his work on interviews with the figures involved and the investigative reports resulting from the scandal, but these are not formally cited as sources and no citations are provided. There are also a few statements that seem vague, such as, “It was a common belief” or “He is said to have told the agent…” Despite using an appropriate number of quotes, it is sometimes hard to tell who is doing the talking. Ultimately, Wieland is an authoritative source, especially considering his ties with the university. He sometimes waxes nostalgic about the days when athletics was not a business, but he also acknowledges similar improprieties in his day. Although he despises the actions of some who perpetuate this big business, he is wise enough to know that the problems are systemic and historical. Wieland offers a remedy for these evils, but has no illusions about their coming to pass anytime soon. A captivating, informative account that goes beyond local interest.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0615478128
Page Count: 130
Publisher: Brown Hill
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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