Jim Nantz’s Always By My Side: A Father’s Grace and a Sports Journey Unlike Any Other, written with Eli Spielman, takes the reader on a compelling journey. Part autobiography, part reminiscence, Always By My Side was inspired by CBS commentator Nantz’s 2007 broadcast triple play of calling three of sports’ grandest events–the Super Bowl, the Final Four and the Masters–in a 63-day period. The sweetness of that triumph was tempered by the fact that his father and namesake was succumbing to Alzheimer’s and could not share or even know of his son’s success. But Nantz discovered a truth that resonated throughout his life: no matter what the circumstance, his father was "always by his side." Moving and easily readable, Nantz’s story offers inside moments that will delight sports fans, while touching the heart of anyone who has watched a loved one slip into the deep fog of Alzheimer’s.

(This review was originally published in June 2008.)

The pace of Down Around Midnight builds quickly, as author Robert Sabbag describes being a passenger on a small commercial airliner that crashes in the woods on Cape Cod. He writes of the incredible force he experiences as the plane hits the trees, ripping his seat from the fuselage and propelling him forward onto the deck of the cabin. He shares his view of remote darkness, the strong smell of leaking jet fuel and the eerie silence after the plane skids to a halt in the foggy woods. He relates the stinging physical pain and the heart-pounding fear as he and the other survivors struggle to escape, alarmed that they might catch fire along with the fuel-soaked aircraft. The sights, sounds, smells and other sensations of the crash are the hook of Down Around Midnight. What follows is Sabbag’s personal journey of recovery—both physical and emotional—and his quest, 28 years after the crash, to talk to fellow survivors.

Remarkably, the June 17, 1979, crash of Air New England Flight 248 claimed only one life: the pilot’s. Nine passengers and the co-pilot lived, and Sabbag uses his training as a journalist to track down some of them almost three decades later. He finds the young woman who braved the dark woods to find help, the medical student who pulled passengers from the wreckage and the Harvard quarterback who tended to the severely injured co-pilot. Their memories of the crash and their reflections on their psychological recovery make for a fascinating examination of how people cope with the aftermath of a traumatic experience.

The only disappointment is that Sabbag, by choice, doesn’t pursue interviews with some survivors, including the co-pilot and three sisters seriously injured in the crash. He also passes on an interview with the pilot’s wife. One can sympathize with Sabbag’s decision based on his sensitivities as a fellow survivor. But as a journalist, he fails to seek all sides of the story; as a result, Down Around Midnight doesn’t close with the same flourish as its energetic beginning. Still, this survivor’s tale should hold the attention of both the seasoned air traveler and the reluctant voyager who has a fear of flying.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

It is no exaggeration to say that Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller reshaped American culture with their songs—tunes such as “Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots,” “Charlie Brown,” “Poison Ivy,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Kansas City,” “Searchin’” and the Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton/Elvis Presley hit that serves as the book’s title, “Hound Dog.”

Individually—and before either had reached his teens—these two Jewish white boys, Leiber from Baltimore and Stoller from Queens, New York, developed a passion for rootsy, hard-bitten black music. After they joined forces in 1950, they found themselves creating the kind of songs that transcended race, an effort that would eventually earn them a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Leiber and Stoller tell their story in alternating segments ranging from a paragraph to a few pages. While this might seem to be a disjointed approach, it actually works quite well since the personalities and voices of the two men are so distinct. Stoller, who still writes music for Leiber’s lyrics, emerges as the more restrained and domesticated of the two. Early on, Leiber was drawn to fast cars and easy women, a combination that once led to tragedy when he crashed his Jaguar on a slick mountain road, killing one of the two call girls riding with him. Stoller and his wife narrowly averted tragedy themselves in 1956 when the ship on which they were returning to New York, the Andrea Doria, sank off the coast of Nantucket.

Leiber and Stoller recall, sometimes with glee, sometimes annoyance, rubbing shoulders with many of the most prominent figures in show business, including Presley, Peggy Lee, producer Phil Spector, actor Ben Gazzara and novelist Norman Mailer (who on one occasion tried to choke Leiber). All in all, theirs is a rich slice of life for both music fans and cultural historians.

“Thanks to Elvis and a host of other white boys,” says Leiber, “rhythm & blues . . . morphed into rock and roll. . . . Unconsciously, we were the avant-garde of a movement that we didn’t even know was a movement or had an avant-garde.”

Edward Morris reviews from Nashville.

Imagine you are a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s. Your world is full of sound. Buses growl, subways thunder, horns honk, people talk, laugh, yell, cry. Radios blare music from open windows. Neighbors babble around you. Weekends at Coney Island fill your ears with everything from the creak and rattle of carnival rides to the endless roar of the ocean surf. Every moment of your life is overwhelmed with sound. But for your parents, every day is silent.

This was the life of Myron Uhlberg, born in 1933 to Louis and Sarah Uhlberg, both deaf since childhood. Into their silence came a boy fully capable of experiencing the sounds they could not, a boy who became a vital link to the hearing world. Enlisted at an early age to translate his parents’ sign language, the young Myron grew up within two worlds, hearing and deaf, facing challenges and responsibilities that most adults never face. But amid those challenges he still found time to be a boy, and discovered the possibilities in language that led him to success as a writer and children’s author (Dad, Jackie, and Me).

Heart-achingly beautiful, Hands of My Father is a richly textured memoir of both sight and sound, a tale of life in all its range, from the pain of prejudice to the wonder of love in a family tightly knit by the rejection of the outside world. Uhlberg skillfully mixes poignancy with humor, creating a book that brings laughter as readily as tears. Through narrative and vignettes of memory, Hands of My Father offers both a flowing story and delightful nuggets, moments of life captured and held, to be viewed and savored. Under Uhlberg’s pen, words take form, like the shapes his father scribed into the air, his hands dancing as they spoke to Myron, and through him to the world at large. By the end, Uhlberg becomes not only his father’s interpreter, but also the reader’s, translating the richness and depth of his parent’s exquisitely expressive language down into printed words. It is a message of memory, struggle and love—and it is a message worth receiving.


Howard Shirley writes from Franklin, Tennessee.

Anyone who’s ever seen a three-year-old throw a major tantrum knows it can be a harrowing experience. Now imagine how much more harrowing it would be if the tantrum—complete with screaming, hitting, breaking things and even flinging packages of chicken around a grocery store—were the actions of a mature woman with the mind of a three-year-old. Terrell Harris Dougan knows only too well, because that person is Irene, her sister. Dougan writes about their relationship in That Went Well: Adventures in Caring For My Sister. It’s a real eye-opener for people who have never dealt, on a personal or bureaucratic level, with the difficulties of caring for a mentally challenged individual.

When Irene was born in 1946, it was soon evident that the baby was "different," but the family didn’t know the extent of her problems until she was tested at age six. They were told Irene’s IQ was around 57, she would never learn to read or write, that emotionally she was about three—and that she would never fit into the public school system. Refusing to send Irene to a state institution, one of the few options at the time, Dougan’s father instead decided to start a school for children with developmental disabilities.

As an adult, Dougan inherited the torch, becoming a key figure in establishing legislative changes in the rights of this country’s mentally disabled citizens. But her relationship with Irene is the warm heart of this book. Despite Irene’s tantrums, strong will and manipulative behavior, Dougan is quick to point out the many joys she has found in her relationship with her sister. Irene will always have the delightful qualities of childhood—she believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny—and she can be hysterically funny.

Providing care to those who cannot care for themselves is an ever-growing concern in today’s society. That Went Well is a pleasant reminder that joy can be found in the role of caregiver, so long as patience and a sense of humor are a healthy part of the process.

Rebecca Bain writes from her home in Nashville.

At one point in the riveting Losing Everything, author David Lozell Martin reveals that he "had to write this book to understand how I could have made so little progress in forty-five years." Readers usually don’t find such a sentence in a memoir, which some authors use as an excuse to take a victory lap. Martin doesn’t do that. Maybe it’s because even before he put a gun to his head in the hopes of ending his personal and professional freefall, there wasn’t much time for celebrating.

Before losing his wife, his money and his home, Martin grew up with an abusive father who had a murderous distrust of his wife. Martin’s mother was far from a stabilizing influence herself, spending time in a mental hospital and even inviting 14-year-old David to have sex with her. Martin, thankfully, left home, working at steel mills to pay for college. He sabotaged his first marriage by writing nonstop and devoting his free time to drinking and philandering. By the time he married his beloved second wife, his future as a lucrative full-time novelist looked bright. The couple handled the prosperity poorly, as their "contempt" for money had a devastating effect: "When the successful years came to a close, we didn’t have the sense or courage to live poor again," he writes.

Obviously, he pulled himself out of the abyss and found his way to stability, but the redemptive narrative isn’t what carries the book; it’s Martin’s brutal honesty in evaluating his life and his relationships. His refreshing penchant for straight talk keeps you reading, even when you’re dreading the consequences of his choices.

Martin comes across as a regular guy who has made some awful decisions, but he accepts the blame without whining or compromise and thus earns our respect. The later chapters of Losing Everything have Martin espousing life lessons and remembering the dead, sections which seem to be lifted from a different book by a cheerier author. Still, you can’t help but smile, because despite his earlier assertion, Martin has made progress.

It wasn’t that Hannah Pool’s birth family in Eritrea didn’t want to renew contact with her. When Pool was a university student in Liverpool, an older brother wrote her a letter. She read it, but didn’t know how to cope with it emotionally. So she didn’t respond. For nine years. The length of her silence underlines how ambivalent Pool felt about her unknown African relatives. Adopted as an infant from an orphanage in always-troubled Eritrea, she had grown up mostly in England, with her British adoptive family. Her adoptive father, an academic expert on Eritrea, was always open about her origins. Pool became a journalist, living a sophisticated urban life in London, but, like virtually every adopted child, she wondered: What were my birth parents like? Do I have siblings? Who do I look like? And, most painfully, why did they give me away?

At 29, Pool finally decided to find the answers, and My Fathers’ Daughter is the result. Her mother had died at her birth, but she found a living father with numerous children, who welcomed her back into their world with excitement and generosity. Pool was thrilled. But she was also terrified, frustrated, fascinated and everything in between. Her moving memoir is a narrative of her inner thoughts as she meets her family, in the Eritrean capital and in remote villages.

Her style is candid and beguiling: she likens the meetings to "first dates," as she worries about what she’s wearing and what on earth she should say to these strangers. She learns how British she is. But she also learns that she looks like her mother, has the same temperament as an older sister, and was never forgotten by her father. When she visits him, he is mildly disapproving of her Western clothes and hair, but unquestioningly cares for her welfare and happiness.

As the plural "fathers" indicates in the book’s title, Pool believes she has come to terms with her dual identity. She is still part of "dad’s" family in England, but she now knows she belongs to an extended clan that she is still discovering.

Anne Bartlett is a journalist in Washington, D.C.