Greenberg’s morning show will never sound the same when fans consider that he has already fielded his wife’s sleepy plaints,...
A pleasing slice of radio sportscaster Greenberg’s life, giving an inkling of how he squares his family priorities with the absurd demands of his job.
When his psychiatrist reassured him that he was not too self-centered to be a father and would surely put his children before his job as host of a popular morning sports-radio show, Greenberg demurred: “Sometimes you don’t put the really important things first. I should know; I talk about sports for a living.” Yet Greenberg, who inherited his obsession with sports from his parents (“I love that [my mother] would have left my father for Joe Namath in a heartbeat, and that he would have applauded her for it,” he reveals) writes with sweet musicality about the wonderful, trying presences of his son and daughter, joking about their urgencies as if he were a high-school prankster. His worldview combines the tenderness of a dad with a sporting man’s vision of harmony; he finds it hard to understand why the world’s war-makers haven’t figured out that at the end of the day combatants should be able to get up, dust off, grab a shower and share a beer. Simplistic? Of course, but it’s still refreshing. “You forgive,” he writes. “It’s what separates us from the animals.” The everyday nonsense of his extended family brings clarity to the exquisite play on the field. Thrill to it while you can, for life is short—except on those nights when a child cries on and on.
Greenberg’s morning show will never sound the same when fans consider that he has already fielded his wife’s sleepy plaints, his aunt’s queries about gambling and his children’s appeal for a warm caress, all before they tuned in to the station.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6438-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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