An intelligently rendered history unlikely to grip a broad readership.
Haymore offers a detailed history of the year the Giles High School football team won the Virginia state championship.
When Steve Ragsdale became the head coach of the football team at Giles High School in Pearisburg, Virginia, everyone already knew his name; his father, Harry, had held the same position for more than 30 years. Steve inherited less-than-bright prospects—the school community was “deeply fractured,” and many adopted a “defeatist attitude” about the team’s hopes of success. Steve knew he had to do more than just coach…he had to establish a “winning tradition.” Just two years later, in 1980, his Spartans won the state championship, a remarkable milestone—over the course of 30 years Steve would win 255 games, an astonishingly impressive number. Haymore provides a relentlessly thorough account of the Spartans’ history, focusing on the early years under Steve’s tenure, one dominated by his “aggressive mentality” in his role as an “intimidating disciplinarian” and a “larger-than-life presence.” The author obviously knows the sport well and furnishes a captivating account of the team’s signature strategy: the unbalanced single-wing offense, established by Steve’s father. (“A masterpiece of old-fashioned power and timely deception, Harry’s refined strategy combined the fierceness of the lion with the cunning of the fox. It was the perfect synergy: the strength of brute-force line bucks and off-tackle smashes mixed with the trickery of reverses, spins, and laterals.”) The depth and rigor of Haymore’s research is laudable, and his enthusiasm for the subject is unabashed and infectious. However, it is very unlikely that a reader unfamiliar with the Spartans football team will be interested in a such a granular history of the program, complete with play-by-play accounts of significant games. This is a well-executed work, but one that only promises to appeal to an exceedingly limited audience.
An intelligently rendered history unlikely to grip a broad readership.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9798888247693
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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