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Book Review
Remember This Titan:
The Bill Yoast Story
Author: Bill Yoast
Review by Sam Monson
5/2/2008
This book promotes itself as the Bill Yoast story, the story of the real hero from the film Remember the Titans, the hit that chronicled the struggles of black and white integration in high school football athletics during the 1971 season at Alexandria, Virginia. If you expect to find that story in the book, you’ll be disappointed.
For a story with so much interest, the book does a simply amazing job of ignoring nearly all of it. The book on Amazon has forty-three 5-Star reviews to just one of any other rating. It’s enough to make one wonder whether they were reading the same thing I was. The book that the Diner was stuck reading didn’t tell us much about the 1971 Titans, it skirted around most of the key players in that story, and it didn’t really give us much insight into coach Yoast, who it does appear has led a pretty interesting life.
Instead what we were subject to was a seemingly endless self-help pamphlet, a guide to philosophical leadership, and general musings from a man who it seems has never had anyone tell him to stop talking such inane bilge. The Chapters are littered with meaningless catchphrases such as ‘To facilitate the process…’, and no one storyline is ever held for more than a few pages, causing the book to leap back and forth with absolutely nothing keeping it together save the meandering lessons that life seems to have taught old Bill Yoast.
If you want to read about football, and the trials and tribulations of the 1971 Titans – Remember the Titans put to words, then this book is the last thing you want. If you’re the kind of guy who loves self-help books, who enjoys reading largely common sense, yet impressively pretentious ramblings about the role of leadership in coaching, then this book is your baby.
The Diner falls into the first category, and can’t stress enough that football fans should avoid this book like the plague. Watch the film instead, and don’t listen to the Amazon reviews!
 
Diner Rating 1/10
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