A pleasure for fans who remember way back to Namath’s glory days—and an entertainment for those who are new to the gridiron...
Hall of Fame quarterback and erstwhile cultural icon Namath (I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow...'Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day, 1970) looks back on a long life of football, fashion, and fun.
Tom Brady may always live with Deflategate hanging over his head, but such shenanigans were the coin of the realm when, half a century ago, Namath was a household word. During one game, he writes, he filed down five thumbtacks and taped them to his fingers to better grip the ball. It was ill-conceived: As he writes, “the ball stuck to the tacks just long enough so the release was too low,” and his passes went straight into the turf. “So the tacks didn’t work,” he adds, with characteristic amiability, “but hey, in the days before playing gloves, the idea was worth a try.” Both all-out star and team player, Namath has much to say on the inspirational front about trying, getting smacked down and dusting yourself off, and the usual sports stuff. He also discusses the N-word, divorce, booze, adultery, and other off-field violations of decor, taste, and ethics, and he has a very long memory for past injuries and insults as well as triumphs: “Oakland was real good, but certainly had some players who completely disregarded the rules of decent sportsmanship”; “This victory, the biggest upset in professional football championship history, was for all underdogs to be shared by all the underdogs.” Though he professes to hate writing, calling himself a “reluctant author” who’d much rather be outside playing, he’s got a handle on the storytelling racket. If it’s not especially literary, it’s good fun, with Burt Reynolds, Janis Joplin, Elvis Presley, and other assorted luminaries joining in. And if you want to know how his college coach, Bear Bryant, came by his nickname, Broadway Joe is the go-to guy.
A pleasure for fans who remember way back to Namath’s glory days—and an entertainment for those who are new to the gridiron hero.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-42110-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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