An entertaining look at an emblematic figure of college football’s early days.
Mitchell (Hornets Never Lie, 1989) delivers a football-focused biography of Douglas “Peahead” Walker, a vibrant coach from the nascent days of big-time college football.
Mitchell starts with Walker’s early 1900s upbringing in Alabama and subsequent high school athletic achievements, starring as a quarterback and a shortstop. From there, Walker plays for a number of collegiate football teams (eligibility rules were a little more lax back then) and plays in and manages semipro baseball leagues across the East Coast. With his playing skills on the decline, Walker took a job in the early 1920s coaching at Atlantic Christian College, building a small athletic program—across three sports—into a team that could punch far above its weight class. Walker continued on to Elon University, finding similar success, before moving in the late 1930s to Wake Forest University, where he became famous. Against bigger and better-funded rivals such as Duke or the University of North Carolina, Walker was able to build his team into a perennial contender that garnered national attention though never quite broke through for a conference championship. After a somewhat acrimonious split with Wake Forest, Walker had a brief stop coaching at Yale before moving, strangely enough, to Montreal to coach the Canadian Football League’s Alouettes. The book abounds with details gleaned from Mitchell’s extensive interviewing and research, with illuminating looks at each one of Walker’s many stops. Especially interesting are the effects of the Great Depression and World War II on Walker’s program-building efforts. The biography focuses on the many humorous Walker stories and anecdotes—most only half-true—giving the book a light, conversational tone. Football fans will love the many factoids about the early days of the game, while less interested readers may grow tired of the game-by-game recapping of nearly every season that Walker coached.
An entertaining look at an emblematic figure of college football’s early days.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61846-019-6
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Library Partners Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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