Good reading to prep for the 2018 season, which many Cowboys-watchers are calling a make-or-break—though who gets made and...
“Love ’em or hate ’em a lot, ambivalence is not on the menu”: a warts-and-all portrait of the storied football club that refuses to give in.
They’ve long been called “America’s team,” much to the chagrin of every other NFL franchise, and it seems fair to say that they’ve been reviled more than they’ve been loved, sometimes even in their hometown. New York Daily News NFL columnist Myers (My First Coach: Inspiring Stories of NFL Quarterbacks and Their Dads, 2017, etc.), who had the Cowboys beat for the Dallas Morning News for nearly four decades, has a more nuanced view of “Jerry’s World,” a franchise built on a huge gamble built in turn on a huge fortune—and one that has since turned into a vast marketing machine whose interests extend far beyond the gridiron. By the author’s account, it all hinges on Jerry Jones, who has never been afraid to make decisions that lost him a lot of fans, until, at least, those decisions turned out to be right, like canning longtime coaches and losing deadweight players. Jones has been as quick as Donald Trump to sue his fellow owners as well, making him persona non grata until, Myers writes, “he showed [them] the way to turn their franchises into ATM machines.” Though fond of sportswriting clichés and set pieces, the author sets up some nice battles, such as the one waged between Jones and coach Bill Parcells over “the mercurial and controversial wide receiver Terrell Owens," for whom Parcells had no use. It was one of the many clashes between Parcells and his boss, though, to hear Myers tell it, Parcells left after one flubbed play too many, with a Cowboys record that, to put it charitably, remains mixed.
Good reading to prep for the 2018 season, which many Cowboys-watchers are calling a make-or-break—though who gets made and who gets broken remains to be seen.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-6234-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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