An inside-baseball look at the business of TV sports through the eyes of a veteran, sometimes controversial presence.
The well-known sportscaster delivers a warts-and-all self-portrait of himself and the business.
Smith—“ ‘Stephen A.’ these days, no last name necessary”—doesn’t expect to be liked, and for good reason: His off-the-cuff commentary on ESPN and other venues has sometimes been ill considered, though perhaps for understandable reasons. “On a show like First Take, or any live debate show,” he writes, “something that causes an uproar happens almost every day. The objective of these shows is to have opposite points of view. To be candid: we capitalize on the kind of polarization people supposedly abhor.” That said, Smith has sometimes pushed things beyond the bounds of good sense, and he’s paid the price for it, though he’s still on the air. Some of his prejudices are well founded. For example, he despises the Dallas Cowboys, not for the team’s players or management but because “I believe they have the most disgusting, nauseating fan base in the annals of sports.” Other of his remarks have smacked of bigotry, though, as when he complained that Los Angeles Angels star Shohei Ohtani “is a dude that needs an interpreter so you can understand what the hell he’s saying,” an especially ill-considered remark in a time of anti-Asian sentiment. To his credit, Smith owns his words and doesn’t try to explain his mistakes away. The best part of the book is his nuanced portrait of how the sports journalism world works, with its almost nonstop personality clashes and sometimes unlikely alliances—and the constant scheming of executives to shake things up for better ratings and bigger money. Of his being paired with Skip Bayless on that ESPN debate show, for instance, he comments, “We didn’t give a shit what anyone thought about it. In the end, we knew we were feeding the audience, and the bottom line.”
An inside-baseball look at the business of TV sports through the eyes of a veteran, sometimes controversial presence.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-982189-49-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: 13A/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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