You Are Looking Live! is a lively and informative book for anyone who wants to know more about the history of television and sports. Not only does Podolsky give an account of the on-air personalities, but one learns about the producers and directors of The NFL Today, about the men who became the heads of CBS Sports division, and the competition between the networks over sports.
Eric Nusbaum’s Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between weaves together the historical narratives, biographies, and accounts of various stakeholders whose lives were impacted by the planning and construction of a modern day American sports cathedral: Dodger Stadium.
Pop culture will forever remember Tommy Morrison for two things: his unanimous-decision win over George Foreman in 1993 for the WBO Heavyweight Championship, and for his co-starring role with Sylvester Stallone in Rocky V. What writer Acevedo makes certain in this book is that Morrison will also be remembered for his fantastic lies and crazed behavior.
In the end, what is clear is that all autobiographers are, alas and inevitably, the heroes or heroines of their own text. As every reader should know, every autobiography, in its own way, subtle or blatant, settles the scores it needs to settle while disguising its subject’s insecurities.
Josiah Howard’s unapologetic, often charming, fondness for Blaxploitation is both the book’s best asset and its greatest limitation. The book gives the films their due, yet, at times feels overly compensative in its efforts.
All In sets a new standard for the heights that an athlete’s memoir can reach, while simultaneously modeling a robust role for the engaged athlete in society.
The reason for being of the book, and one of its dramatic thrills, is that these two friends not only did not fall to the wayside but have endured. They also both pointed the way to the future.
Michael P. Foley’s Why We Kiss Under the Mistletoe is not a history of Christmas but rather a series of chapters broken into vignettes, anecdotes, and historical tidbits about the holiday, ranging from food and drink associated with Christmas to St. Nicholas’s partners, and other saints who also were gift-givers. All of this is written in a highly accessible way that will surely charm or at least entertain a reader in the same way that a book like One Hundred Amazing Facts About, well, whatever might be a pleasant diversion, even as the book tries to remind the faithful that Christmas is no mere diversion, but about God’s engagement with the world or God’s willingness to engage human creation, which is worth taking seriously even for those who do not take this particular story seriously or do not take belief in God seriously.
Watts’s lucid history of Rome’s “dangerous idea” makes clear that the problem is not so much that we do not remember the past, but that we remember the wrong things.
With his new biography of Jim Thorpe, David Maraniss has once more written a book about a seemingly transcendent sports figure. Thorpe is widely recognized as one of, if not the, greatest athlete of the twentieth century.