Sensitively shaded portrait of the late Penn State football coach, an ethical man who failed to “go to the ball” when it really meant something.
When former Sports Illustrated reporter Posnanski, now a senior writer for the website Sports on Earth, set out to write Paterno’s biography, it looked like a dream assignment: The author would be in intimate contact with Paterno and his family, with access to his files about the Penn State football program. This book does have that intimate, backstage feel, and Posnanski tells a story no one else is ever going to get. His voice is warm, but frequently touched by melancholy, because it recounts Paterno’s shattering fall from grace after Jerry Sandusky, the team’s defensive coordinator, was convicted on 45 counts of child molestation. Posnanski offers a number of scenarios to contextualize Paterno’s failure to investigate the allegations that led to Sandusky’s conviction, most persuasively his protectiveness of the program and conviction that the problem could be dealt with in-house. Posnanski draws for readers a man who had a passion for education and saw his players as students first; Penn State athletes had a terrific graduation rate. He would pepper pep talks with Shakespeare; Virgil was his guide. “You have to listen for the divine word that tells you your destiny,” Paterno said to Posnanski. The author charts the many highs and lows of a 61-year career in the voices of both friends and foes. He also traces the dwindling scope of Paterno’s idealism, as the coach grew more crotchety and remote in later years.
Despite Posnanski’s sympathy for his Ivy-educated, Brooklyn street-fighting subject, the book never escapes from the pall of the debacle that ended Paterno’s career.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5749-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | SPORTS & RECREATION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HEALTH & FITNESS
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BOOK REVIEW
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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