A generally appealing blend of eager sportswriting and sober cultural history.
The intertwining stories of a Southern football coaching legend, a star quarterback (who would craft his own legend) and the volatile civil rights movement in the early 1960s.
Roberts (History/Purdue Univ.; A Team for America: The Army–Navy Game that Rallied a Nation, 2012, etc.) teams with Krzemienski (History/Ball State Univ.), who has consulted for HBO sports documentaries and who hails from Beaver Falls, Pa., Namath’s hometown. The authors begin with Namath’s arrival in Tuscaloosa, where he would attend the University of Alabama. The school was not his first choice, but his SAT scores were below the requirements at Maryland, Notre Dame and others. The authors then catch us up to speed on Paul “Bear” Bryant’s life and career, the cultural history of football in the South and the steel-manufacturing life along the Beaver River (near where it dumps into the Ohio). Roberts and Krzemienski then proceed in steady chronology, pausing continually to rehearse the history of the civil rights movement. All the major moments are here (unusual in a sports book): the integration of the Southern universities, the Freedom Riders, the murder of James Meredith, the crusaders for segregation (Gov. George Wallace, Bull Connor), the pathetic pace of integration in Southern college sports. When the Crimson Tide ended the 1964 season ranked No. 1 in the nation, they did so without fielding any black players or playing any teams with any black players. Conventional sportswriting is here, too: accounts of games, individual plays, Namath’s knee injury, his draft and signing with the New York Jets. The authors sometimes leap over the line separating reporting from celebrating, offering continual paeans to Bryant’s character and to Namath’s abilities.
A generally appealing blend of eager sportswriting and sober cultural history.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2633-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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