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
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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