David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

into their livers and spleens, putting them in extraordinary pain. They would turn over in their beds and get terrible bruises. ...

take out the gauze—and the bleeding would start all over again. The goal of the second floor was to find a cure for leukemia. Bu ...

fever, and then you get convulsions, and then...” He let his voice trail off. Doctors did not last long on the leukemia floor. I ...

wanted to work there. I had seventy kids who died on me that year. It was a nightmare.”^6 Not for Freireich. I was never depress ...

named George Brecher—was skeptical. But Freireich thought Brecher wasn’t counting the platelets correctly when he did his analys ...

you say that kind of thing to,” Dick Silver, who worked at NCI with Freireich, says. “Jay didn’t care.” Freireich went out and r ...

of Freireich’s medical fellows in those years. He held his hands far apart. “And you have this kid, who is only this big.” He he ...

7. Where did Freireich’s courage come from? He’s such an imposing and intimidating presence that it is easy to imagine him emerg ...

of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration....When we have been afraid that we may panic in an air-raid, ...

bombed before, Londoners assumed the experience would be terrifying. What frightened them was their prediction about how they wo ...

courage. Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you ear ...

Goliath is about the American civil rights movement, when Martin Luther King Jr. brought his campaign to Birmingham, Alabama. Th ...

blacks from traveling with whites. The day before the protest, on Christmas night, his house was bombed by members of the Ku Klu ...

A voice rose from the wreckage: “I’m not coming out naked.” And, after a few moments, Shuttlesworth emerged in the raincoat some ...

go this far. If I were you, I’d get out of town. These people are vicious.” “Well, Officer, you’re not me,” Shuttlesworth said. ...

congregation pleaded with him to call off the protest. He refused. McWhorter continues: “Hell, yeah, we’re going to ride,” the c ...

decided to personally take his daughter to enroll at the all-white John Herbert Phillips High School. As he drove up, a crowd of ...

“Let’s kill him,” the crowd screamed. From a white female cheering section came advice to “kill the motherfucking nigger and it ...

someone of great resolve and strength. But when he climbed unscathed out of the wreckage of his house, he added an extra layer o ...

my life.” If one remote miss brings exhilaration, we can only imagine what two bring. Not long afterward, Shuttlesworth brought ...