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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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