The organization is a little scattershot, but this is a fascinating subject deserving of further study, and Dohrmann...
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist turns his attention to those who identify obsessively with their teams.
Dohrmann (Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine, 2010, etc.) doesn’t pretend to offer the last word on superfandom. Instead, he spotlights a field of study that is still in its infancy. He shows why the sort of fan studied by psychologists deserves more attention, at least partly because “sports is the rare piece of popular culture that exposes people of different cultures, races, religions and classes to one another, that brings them together on a large scale.” Though the author highlights some of the research and its conclusions, the liveliest parts are character studies of real people who devote their lives to their teams. Some seem to crave attention; others find an outlet for their artistic creativity; still others transfer their addictive tendencies to an obsession with sports. Many are displaced, and gathering with other fans far from where they first identified with the team reinforces their “place attachment.” In such cases as the Green Bay Packers and the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the place is prized for forging certain character values that the fans see the team as embodying—even as the ties between the players and the place might be increasingly tenuous. This is also the rare field of academic research where “these academics behave like the people they study. They know how the sausage is made and yet they still have ordered a double helping.” In other words, they are sports fans who seem to have a lot of fun studying other sports fans and who give presentations such as, “Your Team Stinks! The Impact of Team Identification on Biased Ratings of Odors.” The book runs the gamut from the seriously disturbed sports fanatic to those who find transcendence in a community that might even be more important than the team.
The organization is a little scattershot, but this is a fascinating subject deserving of further study, and Dohrmann provides a good jumping-off point.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-39421-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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