An astute reminder that democracy depends on public spaces where people can congregate and political action can occur.
A peoples’ history of the irresistibility of stadiums as venues for political spectacle.
Since the early 20th century, municipally and privately owned stadiums and indoor arenas have attracted both those involved in politics of resistance and advocates of white nationalism and “militarized patriotism.” They offer places to congregate and a captive audience, and they reinforce social exclusions and preserve social hierarchies. Guridy, a professor of history and African American studies and the author of The Sports Revolution, spins a fascinating story of how stadiums are intertwined with political movements, the corporatization of professional sports, and reactionary forces acting in support of gender inequalities, white supremacy, and the military. After the mid-20th century, publicly owned, multipurpose stadiums served as spaces for grassroots mobilizations by Black civil rights groups, Native Americans, and gay and lesbian organizations. Throughout their history, in fact, sporting events have been sites of patriotic expression such as the singing of the national anthem and, post-9/11, admiration for the military, police, and first responders. The author educates readers on the basketball players who declared their support for the Black Lives Matter movement; the Gay Games held in San Francisco in 1982; a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1939; the Wattstax ’72 concert, which celebrated Black music at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum; Confederate-themed events at southern football stadiums; and an AIDS demonstration at Shea Stadium in 1988 by the women of ACT-UP. Guridy also considers the racial and gender diversity of sports audiences and the decline of income diversity in the 1980s as newly built stadiums became more single-purpose and heavily commercialized and tickets got more expensive. More than architecture, the author shows, stadiums are sites for both preserving and protesting the status quo.
An astute reminder that democracy depends on public spaces where people can congregate and political action can occur.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781541601451
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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