A winning story full of heart, camaraderie, and power.
The underdog story of America’s first women's Olympic basketball team plays out in this thoughtful exploration of social change.
Soon after James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, girls and women began enthusiastically playing the sport. However, it wasn’t until the passage of Title IX in 1972 that American schools were required to provide equal opportunities, allowing female athletes to compete at the same level (though not with the same funding) as their male counterparts. In 1973, the International Olympic Committee added women’s basketball to the 1976 Games in Montreal. Building the squad from the 1973 World University Games team and open tryouts, basketball pioneer Mildred Barnes enabled coaches Billie Moore and Sue Gunter to assemble a scrappy team capable of medaling when no one (not even USA Basketball executive director Bill Wall) thought it possible. Maraniss explores decades of misogyny and sexism, generations of systemic racism, and White feminists’ shortcomings when it came to race that surrounded the humble beginnings of what became a true Olympic powerhouse: As of 2021, the U.S. women’s team has won seven straight gold medals. Interviews with athletes from the 1976 Olympics enhance the invigorating narrative, enriching a book that will stick with readers long after they put it down. Weaving women’s basketball into a textured account of a society in flux, Maraniss’ latest will appeal to a broad audience.
A winning story full of heart, camaraderie, and power. (photo credits, source notes, bibliography, rosters, statistics, box scores, timeline) (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-35124-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
This deeply personal and boldly political offering inspires and ignites.
Curator, author, and activist Drew shares her journey as an artist and the lessons she has learned along the way.
Drew uses her own story to show how deeply intertwined activism and the arts can be. Her choices in college were largely overshadowed by financial need, but a paid summer internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem became a formative experience that led her to major in art history. The black artists who got her interested in the field were conspicuously absent in the college curriculum, however, as was faculty support, so she turned her frustration into action by starting her own blog to boost the work of black artists. After college, Drew’s work in several arts organizations, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, only deepened her commitment to making the art world more accessible to people of color and other marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, and widening the scope of who is welcomed there. Drew narrates deeply personal experiences of frustration, triumph, progress, learning, and sometimes-uncomfortable growth in a conversational tone that draws readers in, showing how her specific lens enabled her to accomplish the work she has done but ultimately inviting readers to add their own contributions, however small, to both art and protest.
This deeply personal and boldly political offering inspires and ignites. (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09518-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Clearly written, with heart and integrity, but lacking in substance: tasty but not very filling.
Melian, a chef, activist, and former Test Kitchen Manager at Bon Appétit, begins this brief memoir by recounting clearing out the freezer and finding and eating one last helping of her mother’s signature fish dish following her death.
Sharing this precious meal with her brother connected them emotionally and physically with their mother one last time. In other vignettes, she ties her love of food to her happy childhood in Argentina; memories of cooking with her cousins at her abuela’s house and, in particular, her abuela’s ravioles de seso; the revelation of a sidewalk vendor’s hot pretzel that she ate following her arrival in New York City to explore a new path after studying journalism in Buenos Aires; and the physical and mental strength she developed after going into business to sell her empanadas. Melian briefly alludes to her work bringing free food education to inner-city public schools, but the stories she shares here are overall more personal and primal—food as sustenance, not as a vehicle for social justice—which feels like a missed opportunity. She also references in passing the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated industry where being Latina and speaking English with an accent affected how she was treated. Each of the individual anecdotes stands alone, without a narrative arc connecting them, but the descriptions of food are rich in sensory detail.
Clearly written, with heart and integrity, but lacking in substance: tasty but not very filling. (Memoir. 12-18)Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-22349-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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