A fiery memoir/manifesto by an athlete with his heart in the right place.
An outspoken activist athlete practically dares readers to think of professional football and its players in the same way again after finishing this book.
To say that Bennett, who co-authored this book with activist-minded Nation sports editor Zirin, has a chip on his shoulder would be an understatement. He was born to a teenage mother and raised by his father with his brother Martellus, also an outspoken pro football player. After the family split and he finished his college career at Texas A&M, he went undrafted by the NFL because he wasn’t considered “coachable”—i.e., he thought too independently and spoke his mind. He calls the NCAA “a gangster operation, a shakedown, and a system that works for everyone but the so-called student-athletes.” He notes how his brother has called the NFL “ 'Niggas For Lease’—and that’s the most brutally honest thing I’ve ever heard”—later, though, he engages in a nuanced analysis of that hateful epithet and its variations. He compares the dehumanizing flesh market of the NFL combine to “slave auctions,” staunchly defends Colin Kaepernick as an athletic hero, and makes an impassioned defense for taking a knee or locking arms during the national anthem. In places, the book reads like the author is trying to be as provocative as possible, but he ultimately shows a commendable seriousness of purpose, providing a call to arms to other pro athletes to use their platforms for cultural responsibility and to fans to understand the human dimension of the NFL and the price paid for the on-field violence that serves as their entertainment. Bennett is particularly incisive on branding and on the conditional nature of fandom: “I’ll be a football player for just a few more years,” he writes, “but I’ll be Black forever.” He ends on a moving note of reconciliation, as he bridges the gulf with his birth mother and tries to get his father, stepmother, and brother to do the same.
A fiery memoir/manifesto by an athlete with his heart in the right place.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-60846-893-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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