NFL crazies will eat this like snack food; more serious readers will shun the empty calories.
A one-time superagent—whose exploits informed the film Jerry Maguire— rehearses his rise, fall and struggles to recover.
Once upon a time, Steinberg (Winning with Integrity: Getting What You're Worth Without Selling Your Soul, 1998) and his agency represented some of the most stellar names in the NFL sky—quarterbacks Warren Moon, Steve Young and Troy Aikman among them. The narrative commences at the 2006 NFL Hall of Fame inductions, when Moon and Aikman were inducted. We then swoop back to 1949 and his birth, boyhood in Los Angeles and the news that his IQ ranks with Einstein’s. (Humility is not a hallmark of Steinberg’s prose—though it does appear near the end.) We follow him to Berkeley (where he continued through law school) and his decision to become a sports agent due to his friendship with quarterback Steve Bartkowski. He negotiated a good deal for his friend, and off he went on his rocket ride to celebrity. It wasn’t long before he was wheeling and dealing and negotiating multimillion-dollar deals for his clients, living high in the hills above the Bay, schmoozing with celebrities of all sorts. Steinberg says he sought character in his clients—and, notably, admirably, urged them to contribute in various ways to charities. He alludes several times to some nastiness in his profession—jealousy, racism (especially the NFL’s dilatory ways vis-à-vis black quarterbacks) and self-absorbed athletes (not entirely their faults). The narrative suffers from some cheesy “guess-what’s-gonna-happen-next?” sentences at the ends of many chapters and from the author’s failure to explore more thoroughly and reflectively his personal weaknesses—alcohol being the principal one. Yes, we read a little about his depressions and his rehab experiences but all in a breezy, “that’s-all-behind-me-now” fashion.
NFL crazies will eat this like snack food; more serious readers will shun the empty calories.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-03042-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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