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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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