Throws a few incompletes, but finds the end zone more often than not.
The life story of one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.
The singular feature commented on by nearly everyone who ever met John Unitas (1933–2002) was the size of his hands. Given the pivotal role he would play in helping the NFL become the multibillion-dollar juggernaut it is today, it’s a good thing he had such massive paws, because his slender, humped shoulders certainly didn’t inspire confidence in his ability to handle everything that was thrust upon him. Handle it he did, however, despite losing his father at the age of five, struggling through a hardscrabble upbringing in Pittsburgh, dealing with skeptics and, in the early years, a public that was largely indifferent to the idea of professional football. Though Unitas’s legend may loom largest, he wasn’t the only key figure to take the field during the 1958 NFL championship game between his Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Dubbed “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” it did more than perhaps any other single game to promote the burgeoning league’s popularity. Consequently, longtime sports journalist Callahan can be forgiven for straying from Unitas occasionally to spotlight a colorful cast of characters that includes Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti and Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb. The anecdotal narrative style recalls George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, and indeed, Unitas’s career overlaps the period Plimpton spent with the Detroit Lions, an elite team the Colts had to overcome to claim their first championship. Though a few stories stray too far from the core narrative, most of them flesh out the world around Unitas, providing insight into this cool, collected leader who inspired his teammates and epitomized what it was to be a professional football player during the game’s halcyon days.
Throws a few incompletes, but finds the end zone more often than not.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8139-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
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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