An easy, straightforward read with plenty to chew on for fans of college football, especially the SEC.
The decorated football player and coach offers an overview of his upbringing and remarkable career.
In his first book, Heisman Trophy winner and award-winning college football coach Spurrier, who has a national championship and six Southeastern Conference championships to his name, leaves no stage of his life unexamined. Though he regrets certain aspects of his coaching career—e.g., leaving his head coaching position at the University of Florida for an unsuccessful stint as the head coach of the Washington Redskins or losing the Chick-fil-A Bowl to Florida State in 2010 while coaching the University of South Carolina—it is noteworthy that he harbors very little bitterness and seldom says a negative word about anyone (especially surprising given his penchant during his career to take jabs at nearly everyone). Demonstrating that he can find motivation from unexpected sources, Spurrier's philosophical inspirations are as wide-ranging as Atilla the Hun, Sun Tzu, John Wooden, and even pop singer Taylor Swift's anthem "Shake It Off." One of the author’s useful pieces of advice for readers is to listen closely to friends and peers, both of which have helped to guide his career. Spurrier shows readers how he reversed the losing records and cultures at Florida and South Carolina and how he left them better than they were when he arrived (though some South Carolina fans who suffered through the bizarre 2015 season, during which the coach stepped down halfway through, may disagree on that last count). "My satisfaction was in charting new territory,” writes the author, “and going where the programs had rarely, if ever, been before.” He certainly accomplished that at both Florida and South Carolina. Some of the other lessons from the head ball coach: treat others fairly, maintain a good reputation, have a charming spouse, and value your country club membership.
An easy, straightforward read with plenty to chew on for fans of college football, especially the SEC.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-57466-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 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
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
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