Amazon.com Review
No football program in the collegiate ranks comes close to Notre Dame's for the sheer weight of myth that cloaks it. The smartness of
Talking Irish is the way myth both speaks for itself and contradicts itself.
Irish is, first and foremost, a solid and anecdotally rich history of Notre Dame football from the 1940s to the present, delivered in a series of first-person voices. These voices, looking back, bring the past into the present with immediacy and intimacy. It's a past that isn't quite as pristinely clean as the Irish myth likes to suggest, particularly in the way coaches and players are pressured not just to win, but to win convincingly. Many of the contributors are legendary--Angelo Bertelli, Johnny Lujack, Johnny Lattner, Ralph Guglielmi, Jim Lynch, Tim Brown, Chris Zorich, Terry Brennan, Ara Parseghian, Lou Holt, even the beleaguered Jerry Faust, who comes off especially whiny. This is a smart book that prefers to tackle a sacred cow rather than accept the usual unwavering reverence.
--Jeff Silverman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
There is no end of books about football at Notre Dame, but this contribution is exceptional because so many quarters have added their voices. The result is a largely honest, well-rounded history that gives readers the benefit of the view from the administration building, the coach's office and the players' locker room. It concentrates primarily on the coaching from 1934 through 1996, emphasizing the regimes of Frank Leahy, Terry Brenna, Ara Parseghian, Dan Devine, Gerry Faust, and Lou Holtz, all of whom felt constant pressure, not just to win but to win by huge margins, and who were eventually flattened by the pressure. The iron-handed, velvet-gloved maneuvers of Fathers Hesburgh and Joyce, who ran the sports program for most of the decades covered, also give the lie to any pretense of democracy in the programs, especially when a coach decided to "retire." The input from players like Angelo Bertelli and Joe Montana, most of whom appear to have been very forthright with Delsohn (co-author with Jim Brown of Out of Bounds), rounds out the pictures of the hard-driving, soft-spoken Leahy and the quiet but efficient Holtz. The coach who comes off worst is Faust, who had triumphed as a high school coach but flopped at the college level and is depicted here as a priggish backstabber who blamed all his troubles on subordinates. In short, there are interesting revelations on every page in this evenhanded study. 16 pages b&w photos not seen by PW. Editor, Patricia Grader; agent, David Black. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
