A thorough, frank, and enlightening assessment of a growing problem in the sports world.
A former wrestling official chronicles the decline of sportsmanship in amateur and professional athletics in this nonfiction book.
West became enthralled with sports while in the fourth grade, and was particularly impressed by those officiating the games. In fact, he admired them so much that he began officiating while in junior high. Eventually, he would become a seasoned official, one who specialized in wrestling. (The author was a star wrestler in high school, good enough to win an athletic scholarship to a community college.) But his career unceremoniously ended when disaster struck—while officiating a high school wrestling match, one of the athletes attacked him. A wrestler, only 17 years old, headbutted West with such force that the blow rendered him unconscious. The ramifications of the assault were extraordinary—the author formally pressed charges, and severe injuries haunted him for years. He underwent four neck surgeries. In addition, he turned to psychotherapy in order to manage the rage and depression that ensued, a predicament he describes with impressive candor and unabashed emotion. In the aftermath of the incident, West became a dedicated activist, advocating for greater protections for sports officials as well as for a movement to reestablish a lost valorization of sportsmanship: “I felt like I was on a crusade. In addition to being a voice for other sports officials, I thought this might provide some type of closure as well. Victims of assault tend to relive their vicious attacks for years and even sometimes never get over it. Here was an avenue to help take my mind off those events.” The author convincingly makes the case that sportsmanship is in a general decline, and that the consequences, especially for younger fans who idolize their athletic heroes, are worthy of concern. In addition, he proposes a series of pragmatic reforms, including holding perpetrators of violence more robustly accountable, that are perfectly sensible, if obvious. But some readers will wish this were a shorter book—they will tire of the autobiographical portions. And while West’s prose is unfailingly clear, it is often anodyne: “I calls ’em as I sees ’em!” Nonetheless, for sports aficionados interested in this genuinely important issue, the author’s treatment is edifying.
A thorough, frank, and enlightening assessment of a growing problem in the sports world.Pub Date: July 13, 2023
ISBN: 978-1039166738
Page Count: 222
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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