How five black men helped to transform UCLA, college and professional sports, and American life.
In the late 1930s and early ’40s, at a time when the vast majority of American colleges and universities had no black athletes, UCLA had numerous black athletes across its athletic program. Five of these stars—the focus of this fine book by Johnson (Emeritus, Journalism/Univ. of Arizona; The Dandy Dons: Bill Russell, K.C. Jones, Phil Woolpert, and One of College Basketball’s Greatest and Most Innovative Teams, 2009, etc.)—would go on to make tremendous contributions to American life beyond the playing fields, and three of them would be pioneers in integrating professional sports. Jackie Robinson is the most famous among them due to his epochal role in integrating Major League Baseball. Ironically enough, for Robinson, a four-sport star at UCLA and arguably one of the greatest all-around athletes in American history, baseball was probably the sport at which he was least adept. Kenny Washington—possibly the best college football player in the country when he was an upperclassman at UCLA—and Woody Strode also competed successfully in multiple sports and were pioneers in integrating professional football in 1946, months before Robinson debuted for the Dodgers. Ray Bartlett was the least well-known of the five men but was a multisport star who faced the same struggles as a leader in race relations. Tom Bradley was a college track star who became a vital member of the Los Angeles Police Department and, even more significantly, the first black mayor of LA. Indeed, all five men had impressive post-sports careers—Strode gained more fame as an actor than as an athlete—and in this short, elegant, important book, the author adeptly shows their lives as sporting and civic pioneers.
Johnson engagingly captures the lives, struggles, and triumphs of five men whose greatness transcended American sports.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0183-6
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“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. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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