An enjoyable romp through the things that helped make the sports we love.
An episodic, somewhat gimmicky, but always engaging history of American sports through material culture.
In this entertaining book, McKinsey & Company editor Murphy (Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, 2007) explores American sports history through 100 different objects from a wide range of the American sporting experience—e.g., balls, articles of clothing, and various ephemera. In chapters of no more than a handful of pages (and sometimes a single page), building on one object from one year, the author shows how the objects of our sports and games take on historical significance based on their larger context. She does not aim for comprehensiveness, ignoring some important moments and athletes, but she provides wide coverage of sports and those who play them. She is especially effective at giving women’s sports their due, placing female athletes front and center in numerous entries. Murphy writes in a conversational, witty fashion, making wry observations without losing touch with the larger historical, social, and political significance of the events and athletes that give the objects their significance. The vast majority of her focus is on the 20th century, though she ranges as far back as the year 1100, examining a statue of a player of an indigenous game known as “chunkey.” She continues through 2016 with two objects: the sobering brain scans of an NFL player who was the victim of chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the inspiring medals from the Special Olympics. The approach is undoubtedly premised on a bit of a contrivance, but the book is a solid reference and will make a great bathroom book. It is a shame, however, that Murphy never mentions, even in passing, Gavin Mortimer’s two almost identically structured books, A History of Football in 100 Objects (2012) and A History of Cricket in 100 Objects (2013).
An enjoyable romp through the things that helped make the sports we love.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09774-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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