An admiring tribute to Bart Starr, who led the Green Bay Packers to NFL Championships in the 1960s and to easy victories in the first two Super Bowls.
Journalist Dunnavant (The Missing Ring: How Bear Bryant and the 1966 Alabama Crimson Tide Were Denied College Football's Most Elusive Prize, 2006, etc.) feigns no objectivity, offering a throwback 1940s-era sports biography that seems to have slipped through a time warp. The narrative begins with the observation that the efficient, stolid Starr has been underrated and then moves to his early life in the mid ’30s. Born to a militaristic father, Starr grew up in a home characterized by competition. Starr’s father encouraged his sons to compete with each other, favored Bart’s brother (who died in boyhood of tetanus) and only grudgingly came to deem worthy the athletic accomplishments of his surviving son. Dunnavant credits the elder Starr’s harsh household for Bart’s moral and athletic growth and throughout rails against the permissiveness of the ’60s. Continually, the author inserts Wikipedian updates on American culture in various years and decades, a technique that soon grows wearisome—as does his fondness for single-sentence paragraphs that seem designed to emphasize but instead add only white space to the narrative. Dunnavant dutifully and unremarkably chronicles Starr’s progress as a player through high school, the University of Alabama and the Packers—at each stage no one expected that he would excel—noting his assiduousness, praising his character (his devotion to his wife, his philanthropy) so often that he sounds like a doting press agent. The author tries to sugarcoat Starr’s later problems as a head coach and GM and, fittingly, ends with the words “thunderous ovation.” A fawning fan letter.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-36349-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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