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
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.
Four decades of football, as chronicled by a well-known sportswriter.
Longtime Sports Illustrated gridiron reporter King takes a maximalist approach, devoting one chapter to each year from 1984, when he started writing about the NFL, to 2023, the last season he covered the league full-time. This lengthy professional memoir features anecdotes and commentary, an argument-starting list of names for his “Mount Rushmore of Pro Football,” a crossword puzzle, and informative tidbits on tactics and playcalling, as well as profiles of singular players and warranted criticism of league bosses’ handling of player health and sports gambling. King skillfully charts the NFL’s inexorable growth. When he started, snail-mail newsletters were must-reads. In today’s media landscape, streaming networks have spent $4.3 billion to broadcast 58 games. As the author illustrates, Paul Tagliabue, a relatively unheralded league commissioner, engineered the year-round fan experience, with “tentpole events like a draft with more fanfare, free agency, and a new TV channel.” Polls showed that baseball and football were equally popular in the ’80s, but, by 2024, football had four times as many fans. Yet King’s kitchen-sink approach results in some bloat. Nobody yearns for a minute-by-minute rehash of the Cowboys’ 1991 draft or a rundown of the “quotes of 2002.” But amid the overabundance, there’s ample charm. In his best chapters, King catches up with guys he wrote about years ago. An 80-something Hall of Fame coach sketches Xs and Os on a notepad. A retired player known for his creative trash-talking shares tricks of the trade. In a powerful chapter, King visits a lab and looks at the damaged brain of a player he voted for in Hall of Fame balloting. This dovetails with King’s number-crunching on per-game hits sustained by players, important analysis as the league considers expanding its schedule.
An overstuffed, enjoyable jaunt through the NFL’s recent past.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781324123637
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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