A provocative thesis bolstered by amusing and instructive anecdotes—but there is a flaw in the defensive line.
The author of Why Read? (2004) and other works of cultural criticism returns with a memoir/treatise about those personal virtues he traces back to his years playing high school football.
Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia; Why Teach?: In Defense of a Real Education, 2013, etc.) arranges each chapter in similar fashion. Each has a theme (courage, manliness, faith, etc.) that he introduces with football memories and expands with later-life examples. Throughout, the author acknowledges the dangers of the game—though for a more incisive discussion of that aspect of the game, see Steve Almond’s Against Football—and he is far too complex a thinker to simply repeat the mantras of coaches and unthinking fans (“Football builds character!”). Moreover, he adorns his text with allusions to writers and literary works. Melville, Joyce, Homer (there is a lot about The Iliad here), Emerson, Ellison, Hemingway, Dickey—these and others form his offensive line. Edmundson also employs references to popular culture (Johnny Carson is on special teams), and there are lots of engaging stories about high school. He begins with boyhood memories of watching football on TV with his father, who made a great ritual of Sundays spent watching his beloved New York Giants—though he had a great fondness, as well, for Jim Brown and Y.A. Tittle. Edmundson writes about how he was sort of disconnected when he decided to give the game a whirl and surprised himself with his assiduousness and determination. He is appealingly self-deprecating throughout and quite certain that it was on the gridiron that he learned and developed his adult virtues. Although he does have a few gratuitous (and unconvincing) comments about women (how do they become virtuous?), he does not have much to say about how non–football-playing young men develop their courage, character, manliness, loyalty and so on.
A provocative thesis bolstered by amusing and instructive anecdotes—but there is a flaw in the defensive line.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59420-575-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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