An uplifting book about triumphing over adversity.
How an all-deaf football team from Southern California beat the odds to become state champions.
Fuller’s beat as San Francisco bureau chief for the New York Times included reporting on hard-hitting “heavy stuff” like in-state natural disasters, mass shootings, and poverty. Yet when he ran across the story of the Cubs, a football team from the California School for the Deaf, Riverside, he felt called to investigate. “This team’s journey, a tale of belonging and excellence, was the story I wanted to write,” he notes. “It felt like a salve at a time of such turmoil for the country.” In 2022, Fuller temporarily gave up his bureau chief position and moved to Riverside, where he followed the team for one extraordinary season when the team “wanted to prove that being deaf on the gridiron gave them an edge.” Watching games and immersing himself in interviews conducted through American Sign Language interpreters, he came to know the players and their community. He also learned about the eight-man game the Cubs played—which some called the purest form of football—while observing how team members, though often physically smaller than those they played, relied on inborn gifts like speed, agility, and their ability to understand their world through heightened powers of observation. What makes Fuller’s book such a page-turner—and very much a story for a wide audience beyond sports enthusiasts—is its deep involvement with the Cubs as people. From the first chapter, the author makes it clear that his story is not just about a winning team, but about human resilience and the players who exemplified it—e.g., Phillip Castaneda, an unhoused student who dazzled on the field with quickness, and Felix Gonzalez, who broke his leg just before the playoffs that the Cubs ultimately won in his honor.
An uplifting book about triumphing over adversity.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780385549875
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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