by Ted A. Kluck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2007
Readers hoping for a revealing insider’s account in the vein of George Plimpton’s Paper Lion will be disappointed.
Sportswriter Kluck (Facing Tyson, 2006) offers a superficial chronicle of his experiences in pro football’s minor leagues.
After a two-year semi-pro career that ended with a broken collarbone in 2001, the author decided at the advanced age of 30 to attempt one last hurrah by signing on with a minor league team: the Battle Creek Crunch of the Great Lakes Indoor Football League. Unfortunately, Kluck proves less interested in the hidden facets of professional football’s lower rungs than in the sport’s more mundane aspects. He describes in detail boring bus rides to the games, violent collisions on the field and hours of pure athleticism in the weight room, which he finds tremendously rewarding. He never refers to disagreements or conflicts among players, never suggests that any of his teammates might use performance-enhancing drugs, rarely gives any glimpse into the nonprofessional lives of his teammates. An opportunity for drama arises when Battle Creek Crunch owner Mike Powell abandons his financial responsibilities and allows the league to take over his team. The author arranges a meeting with Powell, who lied to his players, refused to pay their salaries and even stopped paying into their insurance plan. Yet Kluck refrains from any kind of confrontation, meekly listening as Powell provides excuses for his conduct and never asking the hard questions readers expect from a journalist—or a disgruntled employee, for that matter. Knowing they will probably never be paid, the players slog on and make it to the playoffs despite a losing record. But their willingness to continue seems to reflect apathy more than competitive fire.
Readers hoping for a revealing insider’s account in the vein of George Plimpton’s Paper Lion will be disappointed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59921-043-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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