Throws a few incompletes, but finds the end zone more often than not.
The life story of one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.
The singular feature commented on by nearly everyone who ever met John Unitas (1933–2002) was the size of his hands. Given the pivotal role he would play in helping the NFL become the multibillion-dollar juggernaut it is today, it’s a good thing he had such massive paws, because his slender, humped shoulders certainly didn’t inspire confidence in his ability to handle everything that was thrust upon him. Handle it he did, however, despite losing his father at the age of five, struggling through a hardscrabble upbringing in Pittsburgh, dealing with skeptics and, in the early years, a public that was largely indifferent to the idea of professional football. Though Unitas’s legend may loom largest, he wasn’t the only key figure to take the field during the 1958 NFL championship game between his Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. Dubbed “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” it did more than perhaps any other single game to promote the burgeoning league’s popularity. Consequently, longtime sports journalist Callahan can be forgiven for straying from Unitas occasionally to spotlight a colorful cast of characters that includes Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti and Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb. The anecdotal narrative style recalls George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, and indeed, Unitas’s career overlaps the period Plimpton spent with the Detroit Lions, an elite team the Colts had to overcome to claim their first championship. Though a few stories stray too far from the core narrative, most of them flesh out the world around Unitas, providing insight into this cool, collected leader who inspired his teammates and epitomized what it was to be a professional football player during the game’s halcyon days.
Throws a few incompletes, but finds the end zone more often than not.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8139-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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