The mostly dry prose might be unappealing to anybody beyond avid Penn State fans and a somewhat larger potential audience...
In the latest in the publisher’s Sport and Society series, a retired Pennsylvania State University history professor explores the past, present, and future of major sports, especially football, at Penn State.
The book is inextricably tied to the disclosure in 2011 that Jerry Sandusky, a longtime Penn State assistant football coach, had been sexually molesting boys, often finding them through a philanthropic organization he had founded decades earlier. Sandusky is now serving prison time because of those molestations, but the fallout did not stop with Sandusky's imprisonment nor with the traumatized boys and their loved ones. Legendary Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, now deceased, suffered a significant stain on his previously sterling reputation and lost his job, along with the university president and two high-ranking administrators who reported to the president but allegedly covered up the extent of their knowledge about Sandusky's predatory behavior. Using Penn State archives and other research materials, Smith traces how football, and specifically Paterno, gained unquestioned influence on the campus. When delineating that accumulation of influence over the past 100 years, the author provides admirable research, complete with illuminating anecdotes. However, when Smith enters the legal and moral thickets of the Sandusky case, he falters, rarely revealing anything fresh beyond the massive media coverage that followed the allegations. There is no clear indication that Smith gained access to Sandusky, Paterno before his death, the fired administrators, the prosecutors, the defense lawyers, or the judges handling various criminal charges. The author’s personal knowledge of the university does provide occasional unique insights, and the 14-page timeline is a useful guide.
The mostly dry prose might be unappealing to anybody beyond avid Penn State fans and a somewhat larger potential audience whose members want to understand the dominance of football and basketball at institutions of higher learning.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-252-04001-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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