Valuable background reading for anyone interested in sports activism.
A scholarly study of Black athletes’ protests in the 1960s and ’70s and their complex legacy.
Casual sports fans are likely familiar with Muhammad Ali’s activism and how track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised Black Power fists on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. History professor Kaliss expands on those moments and explores how they were part of a larger effort among Black athletes and women to improve their status during the era, both within their sports and American society. A constant challenge among those protesters, the author shows, was determining how much to work with the system and how much to push against it. For instance, the Black Economic Union, led by star NFL running back Jim Brown from 1966 to 1973, provided financial support for individual Black businesses but paid little attention to systemic racism and ultimately fizzled. In 1969, 14 Black football players at the University of Wyoming were dismissed because of their work pressing for broader change. (The school formally apologized for its actions in 2019.) Forward movement, Kaliss observes, could only be achieved via half-measures—Billie Jean King, for instance, could only win better pay for women tennis pros by softening feminist rhetoric (and partnering with cigarette brand Virginia Slims). The tension between competing visions of progress played out vividly in Ali’s first championship bout with Joe Frazier, where, Kaliss writes, the two became proxies for different ideas of Black manhood and social protest. “Racial politics,” writes the author, “lay at the heart of the impassioned responses to the fight.” The text is well researched and engaging for an academic book. Indeed, a chapter on the ABA, a street-wise counterweight to the stuffier NBA, and its role as a precursor to the hip-hop era, deserves expansion into its own book.
Valuable background reading for anyone interested in sports activism.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780252087066
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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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