The book would have been more engaging as an oral history, weaving together stories and observations from Jackson's...
Richmond (Badasses: The Legend of Snake, Foo, Dr. Death, and John Madden's Oakland Raiders, 2010, etc.) examines how the legendary coach’s search for spiritual truths may have served as the blueprint for his future coaching success.
By NBA standards, Jackson was an eccentric. In college, he majored in philosophy, psychology and religion, and he stood apart from his New York Knicks teammates as he referenced Camus and Sartre in interviews with beat reporters. His enlightenment extended throughout his adult life and NBA tenure. Richmond studies Jackson's entire career, including his seasons coaching the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association, a section that comprises too much of the book. He recounts Jackson's well-known penchant for giving his NBA players reading assignments in an effort to familiarize them with his ideologies and help the 12 dissimilar individuals "coalesce and win.” It is worth noting that although Jackson won a record-breaking 11 championship titles with the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, he was named NBA coach of the year only once. Ironically, this may be due to his peers' opinion that his success was not due to his coaching ability; rather, he was lucky to coach superstar players and work alongside equally skilled general managers who created those teams. Ultimately, Richmond strains to represent Jackson's coaching methods as an outgrowth of his personal value system, particularly when he posits that Jackson's famed "triangle offense"—something of a free-form strategy that creates flow within the game and becomes instinctive—mirrors the three components of Buddhist philosophy, as well as Jackson's spiritual belief system, comprised of Christian, Zen and Buddhist doctrines.
The book would have been more engaging as an oral history, weaving together stories and observations from Jackson's colleagues, teammates and friends. The narrative ends with the author no closer to validating his premise that Jackson's "Zen thing" has been the key to his success.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-15870-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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