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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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