Word: toback
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...James Toback. 133 pages. Dou-b/eday...
When James Toback (Harvard, magna cum laude, 1966) flew to Los Angeles to interview Jim Brown (Cleveland Browns, summa, 1965), there were some unnecessarily dressy items in his mental luggage: Nietzsche's code about "the genius of the heart," Keats' concept of "negative capability," and that always stylish bit about the pre-eminence of the black's psychosexual powers...
...most important thing in Toback's bag, however, was the jockstrap ego of an ex-college athlete. Within an hour after he met Jim Brown at his home above Sunset Strip, the two were out on the basketball court in Brown's driveway. Down nine to nothing in a ten-point, one-on-one game, the man who walked out on pro football to prove his competence as an actor, businessman and racial leader very softly asks Toback if he really thinks he is going to win. Brown then sinks ten straight, leaving a thoroughly psyched Toback revealed...
...will to submission," Toback calls it. If he forgoes examination of the malady's finer points and racial implications, it isn't because he left his copy of Benito Cereno in New York. It is because Toback got so busy trying to certify his manhood in what he believes to be the black man's terms that submission was soon out of the question. So was the magazine article he had intended to write. But by the time that became apparent, Toback and "J.B." were good friends. This odd book is a fascinating chronicle of that very...
...Brown been less sure of his own prowess, he might have seriously scarred the vulnerable young writer. But as a swinging Batman to Toback's cocky Elobin, J.B. proves to be a concerned and even therapeutic big brother. When Toback's wife, the granddaughter of an English duke, leaves him, Brown is helpful though not overly sympathetic. It didn't take much to see that Toback had been confused about which Marl-Dorough country he really wanted to come home...