An urban-ghetto saga of youthful despair and self-destruction transformed into a striving for excellence, told by a sportswriter and a dedicated Little League coach. Give Coach Dixon points for honesty. He was a talented young athlete but he was also, he tells us, a smug, grandstanding punk with a taste for wine, women, and gambling. He wasted, he says, every athletic and academic opportunity that came his way. After dropping out of college, he landed a job by using his computer skills to forge a college transcript. His life began to turn around when the company found out about his deception but elected to keep him on. He blossomed in the corporate world, finding a self-confidence he had not known outside of the playing field. Several years later, Dixon drove through his old Pittsburgh ghetto neighborhood and was angered by the lack of respect and discipline he saw on the local baseball field. While watching, he was recruited to umpire a ragged Little League game and swiftly got drawn into coaching. He also got hooked on a single mother with a troubled fifth-grader named Lance. Lance displayed all the surliness and defensive indifference toward school that young Dixon did, and Coach Tru became obsessed with making Lance and his Little League teammates into self-respecting, determined young men. To the book's credit, all the many pitfalls, reversals, and failures in this improbable crusade are recorded. The players slowly respond to their strict but caring coach, turning into winners. Dixon's team gets their name, The Next Level, from the response he demands when he yells ``How far do you wanna go?'' to his troops. With plenty of emotion, humor, and good baseball description, we follow the team's climb to the championship level. An inspiring, heart-warming Bad News Bears for the inner city. (12 b&w photos, not seen) (TV and radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-88282-155-5
Page Count: 316
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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