Well-crafted insights about the many ways football reflects and challenges Latin American societies.
On the eve of the World Cup in Brazil comes an investigation of the meaning of fútbol, from Mexico to Cape Horn.
Soccer is the world’s sport, but nowhere does it seem to resonate more than in Latin America. Nadel (History and Global Studies/North Carolina Central Univ.) explores the intersections of sport and politics across that region. He does not quite explain why soccer matters, but he shows how the fact that it matters has had tremendous social consequence for more than a century. The author examines the role of soccer in many of the Latin American countries, from Mexico to Brazil (the unquestioned top dog in the region, if not the world) to Argentina to Uruguay. In addition to the introduction and epilogue, there are three brief “interludes” exploring the role of the media, professionalization and why Venezuelans embrace baseball. In the aptly titled chapter “Left Out,” Nadel investigates the region’s undervaluation of women’s soccer. In terms of soccer’s spread, while there were variations in each country, similar themes emerge. In the late 19th century, the game arrived from England, oftentimes imported by owners of companies or their workers, who wanted a hint of home in a foreign land. Early on, the main participants were (usually European) elites, but invariably, the game trickled down to the masses. Once the game became widespread, however, politicians, including the region’s despots, tried to use the game to control the polity. At the same time, that meant that soccer also became an ideal venue for political opposition. Nadel also explores issues such as race in Honduran soccer (a theme that he easily could have applied to several countries) and Mexico’s peculiar underachievement. The author manages to provide capsule histories of the region and soccer development without disrupting the strains of his argument.
Well-crafted insights about the many ways football reflects and challenges Latin American societies.Pub Date: April 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8130-4938-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. Press of Florida
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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