A must-read for fans of “America’s Team” and, given Landry’s impact on the game, for Cowboy haters too.
A prolific sportswriter submits a meaty biography of one of the NFL’s legendary coaches.
Except for his World War II service and 10 years spent in New York, most notably as a player, then as defensive coach for the Giants, Tom Landry (1924–2000) was all Texas. Born, raised and educated in the Lone Star State, Landry returned in 1960 to coach the expansion Dallas Cowboys for a record 29 years. After a rocky start, the stoic Landry, among the game’s most influential innovators, turned the franchise into a consistent winner and a huge source of pride for a football-obsessed state and an up-and-coming city looking to live down the shame of the JFK assassination. Although he was revered by fans and the media until new owner Jerry Jones unceremoniously fired him, Landry’s buttoned-up life poses difficulties for any biographer. Ribowsky (Howard Cosell: The Man, the Myth, and the Transformation of American Sports, 2011, etc.) solves most of them by coming at the coach from all angles: thoroughly exploring the Texas connection; interviewing his widow for personal and family stories that open a window on the interior life of the closemouthed coach; examining his complex relationships with some of his greatest stars—Don Meredith, Roger Staubach, Bob Hayes—who vainly sought his approval; delineating his role in the Cowboy organization that featured swashbuckling owner Clint Murchison, shrewd president Tex Schramm and super scout Gil Brandt; explaining the complex schemes behind Landry’s exciting brand of football; teasing out his tortured handling of troubled players like Hollywood Henderson and Duane Thomas; measuring the family man and devout Christian against the seemingly bloodless coach who appeared to prize his system over people, who turned a blind eye to the decidedly heathen lifestyle of so many of his players. If Ribowsky never quite penetrates to Landry’s core, he still provides as complete a picture of “God’s Coach” as we’re likely to get.
A must-read for fans of “America’s Team” and, given Landry’s impact on the game, for Cowboy haters too.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-87140-333-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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