A winner for fans of modern football.
A thorough but light-handed account of the making of a sports dynasty.
Peyton and Eli Manning are the big names in a football family with roots in the football-crazy Deep South, Eli renowned as the second-highest-paid quarterback in NFL history, Peyton as “the face of the most popular sport in America.” Yet the Mannings, as older readers and fans will know, go beyond the brothers. Longtime Sports Illustrated reporter Anderson (The Storm and the Tide: Tragedy, Hope, and Triumph in Tuscaloosa, 2014, etc.) begins and ends his vigorous story with Peyton’s triumphant performance at Super Bowl 50, when he ended his career as the lead quarterback for the Denver Broncos. As the author notes, Peyton’s numbers were legacy enough, with a record-setting number of 4,000-yard passing seasons, but he also was influential enough to change the rules regarding contact with defensive backs. Anderson digs in deep to trace the family franchise to the Depression era, especially to patriarch Archie Manning, who began as a rising star in basketball but, having failed an audition for a college slot, switched over to football at Ole Miss and, “a classic overachiever,” became a renowned quarterback with a healthy respect for the fundamentals of the game: controlling the ball with the fingers and not the palm, standing with balance, throwing straight and on-target. Archie’s college career helped improve a strained relationship with his own father, and he set numerous records and became a legend in Ole Miss lore. Archie Manning certainly isn’t an obscure figure in football, nor is his son Cooper, forced to leave the game for medical reasons, but it’s good to see both get more of their due from under the shadow of their more famous kin, and Anderson’s yarn never wobbles.
A winner for fans of modern football.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-88382-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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