The football Cardinals are the NFL's equivalent of the long-suffering yet resilient cartoon character Charlie Brown. As a life-long fan of the Cards, this book shed a lot of light on the little known period of NFL history of leather (or no) helmets and before the era of big salaries, celebrity status of players, and the hype.

The anecdotes and narrative make for light reading, the kind of book you can put aside and pick up later without missing a beat. The crisp photos of the Cards playing and practicing on Chicago's South Side are priceless.

The book does happily note that the Arizona Cardinals finally broke the losing jinx in 1999, winning the team's first playoff game since the 1947!

Possible suggestions for improving the book would have been an index and a little more history on the Bidwell twins, including current Cardinals owner Bill Bidwell, who inherited the team from their father.

This lighthearted and otherwise sound book is tripped up by its occasional harsh treatment of some German areas or cities, in particular those in the former East Germany. Case in point is Frankfurt/Oder which is an historic, former East German city that sits across the Oder River from Poland.

In both this book and a similar one on Berlin by Lonely Planet, the writers appear to go out of their way to bash Frankfurt/Oder with petty criticisms ranging from the architecture to the people. I made a day trip to check out Frankfurt/Oder after reading such a review, thinking to myself that it can't be as bad as the writers at Lonely Planet say. My experiences were much the opposite, with friendly and helpful people, a charming downtown with picturesque streetcars, and a panoromic view of Poland across the Oder River from a walkway. Is it as charming as, say, Heidelberg or Bamberg? No, but it is very East German in contrast.

Take some of the advice with a grain of salt in this book and go with an open mind to enjoy the uniqueness of East German life before it disappers.