A thoughtful anecdotal study of protest in our time.
Take a knee, everyone, and start a revolution.
NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick did not act impulsively when, in 2016, he knelt down on one knee to protest police violence and racism. He had a long conversation with another NFL player and former Green Beret soldier, who suggested that the protest would be more visible and more meaningful than if Kaepernick simply refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem. “That was, it is safe to say now, a miscalculation,” writes Zirin, sports editor for the Nation. The year 2016 witnessed the rise of Donald Trump, “unrepentantly divisive and proudly bigoted,” who would go on to reveal his true racist colors the following year at Charlottesville; with Trump, a flood tide of White resentment and anti-Black acts would overwhelm the country. In response, as Zirin chronicles, players and protestors of many ethnicities emulated Kaepernick, sometimes courting significant trouble in doing so. These included a high school class of student athletes who collectively decided to take the knee in racially troubled Minneapolis, a cheerleader who acted alone in doing so, a Black student athlete in a mostly White community in New York who, appalled that the Confederate flag was being flown “as an all-purpose symbol of white supremacy,” launched a protest that caught on among young people: “I’m getting recognized for football,” he reasoned, “why can’t I get recognized for speaking?” Zirin closes his account, which is more in the way of vivid character sketches than anything driven by a governing thesis, with a conversation with John Carlos, who famously raised a fist in a Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games and who sagely counsels, “Love thyself. Love thy neighbor. Set a precedent and let them know that we are not the negative force in society. We are the positive force.”
A thoughtful anecdotal study of protest in our time.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-62097-675-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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