No better and no worse than the human-interest sports profiles on a local TV channel.
Football writer and New York Daily News columnist Myers (Brady vs Manning: The Untold Story of the Rivalry that Transformed the NFL, 2015, etc.) looks at how fathers shape the on-field habits of their quarterback sons.
Is there a formula for nurturing a winning quarterback? No, at least not one that can be discerned in this book. Indeed, the author rather wanly notes, “there is more than one way to raise a quarterback.” In this gathering of profiles of some of the usual suspects, including Eli Manning and Joe Montana, Myers observes that some fathers make great sacrifices to be on hand for their boys as they grow into the sport, while others stay at some distance in order not to be stage fathers. None are completely disengaged, at least not in this collection, and some far from it. As the author writes in the opening profile, Jim Harbaugh’s father, Jack, was a one-man cheerleading squad, coach, and catch partner all in one, while, in a later profile, he notes that Jameis Winston’s dad, a highway maintenance worker, had his son playing tackle football at the age of 4. Throughout, the writing is pedestrian but rah-rah: “Jameis is his football stage name. Just like how Tom Brady is never called ‘Tommy’ in the media or by Patriots fans, but his parents, his wife, his sisters, and his closest friends all call him Tommy.” The stories are pleasant enough but not terribly revealing; the most engaging, if perhaps a touch mean, is a look at how the genius QB gene seems to have skipped generations in the case of Joe Montana’s sons. There’s just not much depth here, and one can only imagine what, say, Frank Deford might have made of the same material in seeking out what lesser dads might do to goose their sons along.
No better and no worse than the human-interest sports profiles on a local TV channel.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9846-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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