A biography whose dough needs less honey and more salt.
A freelance sportswriter debuts with a generous, admiring account of the life of pioneering basketball coach Forrest Clare “Phog” Allen (1885-1974).
The author, who has written for Sports Illustrated and other publications, has few negative comments about his subject, who acquired the nickname “Phog” because of his booming, foghornlike voice. Though Johnson briefly discusses Allen’s retro racial attitudes—though he relaxed them while recruiting Wilt Chamberlain near the end of his long coaching career at the University of Kansas—there is little else to distinguish the tone from a gung-ho 1950s-era sports biography. Unfortunately, cliché has a happy home in the text (clocks are ticking, emotions wash over people), and the author’s admiration is so firm that he comes near to praising Allen’s strategy in one key game of having his players fall down when they were near the star of the other team; foul calls ensued. Nonetheless, Johnson did his homework, and there is much to learn here, not just about Allen’s remarkable career (590-219 at Kansas) and enduring influence (he coached Adolph Rupp and Dean Smith, among other notables), but about his family history, his wife and children, and the early days of basketball, when each team picked one person to shoot foul shots, the heavy ball was difficult to dribble, and there was no shot clock. We see Allen as a coach obsessed with the fundamentals—and with physical conditioning, his own included—a man who earned a degree in osteopathy and operated a clinic, who was instrumental in forming the NCAA and in getting basketball included in the Olympics. A national legend when he retired, he nonetheless slipped away from public consciousness, his name now known principally to residents of Kansas and basketball cognoscenti.
A biography whose dough needs less honey and more salt.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8571-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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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