A white scholar's righteous (at times even self-righteous) debunking of the racial folklore of American sports, which made complex legends of Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson, and Muhammad Ali, and a contemporary icon and media commodity of Michael Jordan. Hoberman is a professor of Germanic languages (Univ. of Texas, Austin) with a longtime research interest in the role of sports in culture and history (Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport, 1992). He is justifiably outraged that America's sports obsession, driven by its huge commercial sports, media, and entertainment complex, has focused many black youths on athletic achievement, to the detriment of academic and intellectual accomplishment. He goes on to debunk the myth of color-blindness and racial harmony in today's sports world. He also criticizes the black middle class for its complacence about all these debilitating influences. But few African-Americans have much impact on the sports star-making machinery, and many are as distressed as Hoberman about the culture's oversteering black youth toward sports and entertainment as the path to success. (The late Arthur Ashe founded an organization of sports professionals to mentor talented young black athletes and broaden their sense of options beyond a big pro sports payday and celebrity, a fact of which Hoberman seems to be unaware.) Hoberman is most compelling, however, in his wide-ranging survey of 19th-century anthropological and ethnological literature, and he exhaustively shows how old racist notions of black physique have been oddly recycled in contemporary commentary on athletic competition. Hoberman means this to be an antidote to confusing media hype about black sports heroes, and at its best, it provides the fascinating intellectual and social history behind the modern sports contest. Unfortunately, the author belabors his points, and some of his hyperbolic social arguments run away with him. (b&w line drawings)
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-82291-0
Page Count: 367
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.
The latest collection of interrelated essays by the veteran fishing writer.
As in his previous books—from The View From Rat Lake through All Fishermen Are Liars—Gierach hones in on the ups and downs of fishing, and those looking for how-to tips will find plenty here on rods, flies, guides, streams, and pretty much everything else that informs the fishing life. It is the everything else that has earned Gierach the following of fellow writers and legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life. In one representatively poetic passage, he writes, “it was a chilly fall afternoon with the leaves changing, the current whispering, and a pale moon in a daytime sky. The river seemed inscrutable, but alive with possibility.” Gierach writes about both patience and process, and he describes the long spells between catches as the fisherman’s equivalent of writer’s block. Even when catching fish is the point, it almost seems beside the point (anglers will understand that sentiment): At the end of one essay, he writes, “I was cold, bored, hungry, and fishless, but there was still nowhere else I’d have rather been—something anyone who fishes will understand.” Most readers will be profoundly moved by the meditation on mortality within the blandly titled “Up in Michigan,” a character study of a man dying of cancer. Though the author had known and been fishing with him for three decades, his reticence kept anyone from knowing him too well. Still, writes Gierach, “I came to think of [his] glancing pronouncements as Michigan haiku: brief, no more than obliquely revealing, and oddly beautiful.” Ultimately, the man was focused on settling accounts, getting in one last fishing trip, and then planning to “sit in the sun and think things over until it’s time for hospice.”
In these insightfully droll essays, Gierach shows us how fishing offers plenty of time to think things over.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6858-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich...
A reflective and entertaining journey through Japan, as the author seeks to reconnect with his martial arts sensei.
Lowry is a student of koryu (not to be confused with kendo), a style of Japanese classical swordsmanship. Koryu is a medieval art, like Noh and the tea ceremony, a style of combat born on the battlefield–but more importantly, it’s a way to address the world (though an esoteric one: Lowry may well be the only American practicing the art in the United States). Indeed, present-day practitioners refrain from exercising its fatal possibilities. Lowry’s sensei left the U.S. to return to Japan, urging Lowry to follow. Though his life headed in a different direction, he never forgot his training–when the time was ripe, he journeyed to Japan to join his sensei. The narrative revolves around this pivotal decision, and it provides a warm center from which the author expounds on such topics as the glories of a Japanese bath; the evolution of the Samurai caste; the peculiarities of Japanese landscape architecture; the elements of proper sandal-tying; the custom of the premarital shenanigans called yobai; and the teachings of mikkyo Buddhism. He also includes the vital story of the sword–what it reveals about Japanese life and technology, social structure and aesthetic values, etiquette, apprenticeship and the process of education. Lowry’s seriousness lends an earnest cast to the proceedings, but he’s not without a sense of humor–commenting upon his accomplished slurping of noodles, a friend’s wife notes, “He really sucks!”
A broad and deep look at Japan’s medieval referents, and a capable illustration of a martial art form steeped in rich tradition.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2005
ISBN: 1-890536-10-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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