There are many good reasons why Saban’s Alabama teams have won four national championships in the past decade, and Savage...
A football lifer gives insight into how the Alabama Crimson Tide continue to be the most dominant force in college football.
Savage has had a long career in football, serving in nearly every capacity in the sport. A small college quarterback, he has served as an assistant coach and scout in both college and professional football. He was the general manager of the Cleveland Browns and is now a radio color analyst for the Crimson Tide Sports Network. In several of these capacities, he has worked with or for Nick Saban, the Alabama head coach who has won five national championships—four of those since arriving in Tuscaloosa in 2007. Thus Savage has had a front-seat view of Saban’s nearly unimaginable run of success with the Crimson Tide. Furthermore, in providing scouting reports to Saban and his staff on every opponent since he took over his radio gig, the author has contributed to Alabama’s run of dominance. In this book, written with sports journalist Glier (How the SEC Became Goliath: The Making of College Football's Most Dominant Conference, 2012, etc.), Savage provides his “textbook on Saban’s way of doing business at Alabama.” Because he has worked as both a coach and in personnel, the author is equally adept at switching among tactics, strategy on the field, and player evaluation. He effectively conveys the complexities of football for an audience of football junkies and casual fans alike. Fans of college football generally and Alabama in particular will especially value the book. However, Savage falls short in two areas: there is a lot of repetition not only of concepts, but of pet phrases and ideas, and the author too frequently reiterates Saban’s greatness as a coach and Alabama’s success as a program under him (both of which are self-evident at this point).
There are many good reasons why Saban’s Alabama teams have won four national championships in the past decade, and Savage effectively reveals how and why.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-13080-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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