A powerful commentary and memoir that challenge Western narratives of Sierra Leone.
A debut author blends autobiography and ethnography in this exploration of Sierra Leone in the 1980s.
The recent history of Sierra Leone is one often associated with violence, disease, and tragedy. From the decade-long Blood Diamond War of the 1990s through the Ebola outbreak of the 2010s that killed tens of thousands and displaced millions, the West African nation has been the epicenter of human rights crises for the past 30 years. In this book, Small not only encourages readers to place those tragedies within a larger post-colonial context, but also highlights a vibrant history of the nation from a grassroots perspective in the decade that predated the violence of the ’90s. A Peace Corps volunteer who was born only a year after Sierra Leone became an independent country in 1961, the author spent three years in Tokpombu, a village located 250 miles from the nation’s Atlantic coast (“Here I was, in someone else’s history and culture—in a rainforest village of 400 rice farmers along a one-lane, rock-ribbed road connecting diamond buyers with diamond diggers”). And while the book shares her direct observations on the region’s rural culture, largely based on her journal notes from that time, it fundamentally seeks to reconcile her experiences in a peaceful village with the post-1991 history of violence and disease that plagued the region. In doing so, the work is at its best when placing late-20th-century Sierra Leone within a historical context, effectively demonstrating how the events of the ’90s and early 2000s are intertwined with the nation’s history of trans-Atlantic slavery, colonialism, and changing American foreign and economic policy under the Reagan administration in the ’80s. An astute ethnographer, Small also draws comparisons between Sierra Leone’s culture and language and South Carolina’s Gullah population. The book offers insights on the advantages of the Peace Corps while recognizing the predominantly white makeup of its volunteers. Despite the Peace Corps’ active presence in Africa in the 1960s, for instance, it was not until 1977 when it saw the appointment of the first African American U.S. director. The volume’s solid grasp of history and anthropology will attract scholarly minded readers while its engaging prose delivers an accessible reevaluation of a misunderstood nation.
A powerful commentary and memoir that challenge Western narratives of Sierra Leone.Pub Date: March 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780472057290
Page Count: 218
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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