by Rus Bradburd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010
Establishes Richardson as one of college basketball’s most compelling figures, both because of and in spite of his race.
A combination career retrospective and racial history of Southern college basketball.
It’s unjust that the legacy of Nolan Richardson, legendary former University of Arkansas basketball coach, is distorted by a surreal 2002 press conference that resulted in his termination. Bradburd (Writing/New Mexico State Univ. Paddy on the Hardwood: A Journey in Irish Hoops, 2006) uses that incident—in which the frustrated coach rambled about slavery and proclaimed that if the university would pay him his money, they could take his job—as a springboard to explore Richardson’s controversial yet undeniably influential life and career. Raised in segregated El Paso, Texas, Richardson became a multisport high-school star before playing for Don Haskins—the first coach to win an NCAA championship starting all black players—at Texas Western College, after which he embarked on a coaching career seemingly destined to fail because of his race. Still, Richardson persevered, rising through the ranks before breaking into Division I coaching at the University of Tulsa. He later achieved historical success at Arkansas in 1994, becoming only the second black coach to win a championship. His on-court achievements, however, were shadowed by personal troubles, including the death of his daughter and an acrimonious power struggle with Arkansas’ athletic director, Frank Broyles. Richardson’s staunch opposition to racist slights, both real and perceived, led to what Bradburd contends is an unfair reputation as an angry, ungrateful black man—a perception refuted by Richardson’s habit of befriending older white men (including sportswriter Orville Henry and Tulsa booster Ed Beshara) and donating considerable amounts of time and money to charities that aid children of all races. The author’s ambitious attempt to contextualize Richardson’s struggles within the larger historical framework of racism in the South adds nuance, but occasionally derails the narrative flow. Nevertheless, he manages to transform the prickly coach into a complex figure worthy of reexamination.
Establishes Richardson as one of college basketball’s most compelling figures, both because of and in spite of his race.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-169046-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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