An engaging memoir explores football and fandom.
A debut book offers a personal and literary inquiry into the role of football in one man’s life and in American society.
“Why has football been such a big deal in my life, and in the lives of so many?” Liparulo asks in this volume. “Will I have to confess to the sin of football idolatry?” If such a confession is necessary, he certainly won’t be making it alone: the NFL is a $9 billion industry in the U.S., and the college-level network of teams is a sprawling moneymaker for schools all across the country. Liparulo often reminds his readers that “fan” is short for “fanatic,” and in America, there’s no sport that highlights that connection quite like football. But the sport isn’t Liparulo’s first idolatry; in richly observed, intensely satisfying chapters of personal recollection, he reflects on his years growing up listening to Tom Petty, Led Zeppelin, the Doobie Brothers, and Blue Oyster Cult and confesses that “rock and roll became my first religion.” Throughout his book, his narrative veers between these autobiographical chapters and more philosophical sections reflecting on the sport of football as seen through the prism of a handful of iconic games. He tells the story of his life: the friends of his youth in upstate New York, their fledgling attempts at forming rock bands of their own, his classes at Binghamton University, his ROTC experiences and service as an infantry officer in 1980s South Korea, his later teaching career. These vivid recollections are suffused with his love of literature; quotes from the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost are littered throughout the text (this may be the only football memoir to include multiple allusions to Michel Foucault). But the story keeps returning to football, “the big lie at the heart of the American dream,” with all its growing problems, including the harsh realities for players with brain injuries sustained on the field, a scandal that has thousands of plaintiffs pursuing legal action against the NFL. Liparulo blends all this professional and personal material with an easy, literate skill that should appeal even to nonfans.
An engaging memoir explores football and fandom.Pub Date: June 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5308-5581-0
Page Count: 362
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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