An enjoyable, colorful look at the intersection of sports and politics.
A study of how the true characters of U.S. presidents have been revealed by the sports they played, watched, and followed.
The Oval Office can be a lonely place, and all presidents have sought to escape the pressure through sports, whether participating or watching. As CNN politics reporter Cillizza shows, it can also be a way of projecting an image of common-man virility. Eisenhower had played a variety of sports in his younger days, but when he was in the White House, he obsessively focused on golf, even setting up a putting green on the lawn. He also played a mean game of bridge. Kennedy played golf but used the touch-football games with his family as media props. Socially awkward, Nixon tried to compensate by memorizing statistics about football so he could make small talk. A peculiarity of Nixon is that he was a good bowler, and he even had lanes built in the White House basement (although he always bowled alone). Reagan was not a great sportsman while president, although he exercised vigorously and loved riding horses. George H.W. Bush played many sports well but was especially skilled at horseshoes. Clinton was a dedicated runner but later concentrated on golf. George W. Bush likewise pounded the pavement and even had a treadmill put onboard Air Force One. Obama is remembered for pickup games of basketball; like most presidents he showed himself to be hypercompetitive, even aggressive, when playing. He also took up bowling, using Nixon’s lanes. All this is good fun, but Cillizza cannot restrain himself when it comes to the chapter on Trump, which is dripping with snark (“it’s impossible to see where Trump ends and his golfing bullshit begins”). Though many of Trump’s actions deserve scorn, it’s a sour ending to an entertaining, good-natured read.
An enjoyable, colorful look at the intersection of sports and politics.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781538720608
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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