Goucher makes a strong case against a powerful sports machine.
A track-and-field star pulls the lid off the big money behind corporate sponsorship of sports.
In 2015, Goucher made news when, with her husband, a fellow Olympian, she accused Alberto Salazar, their coach at the Nike Oregon Project, of violating anti-doping rules. The abuse she chronicles in this book goes further than that. Entering distance running only eight years after the women’s marathon was made an Olympic event, Goucher was immediately confronted by issues of body image, and she imposed self-destructive rules against such things as eating more than 700 calories before dinner. Following the end of her NCAA collegiate eligibility, she won Nike’s sponsorship as a professional runner, a contract that paid little (to women, at least) and involved a range of demerits as well as incentives. The money would come to be an issue. So would the training regime imposed by Salazar, who, Goucher alleges, abused her sexually and psychologically but who was held in such reverence—he founded the Nike program in the same year that he was inducted into the National Track & Field Hall of Fame—that it was difficult to raise objections and be believed. A helpful team doctor, meanwhile, discovered a demographically improbable streak of hyperthyroidism through the team roster, for which he prescribed an energy-boosting drug that was allowed under anti-doping rules. Later, Goucher used a battery of prescribed “supplements” that probably violated the spirit but not the letter of the regulations. Racism against African runners, sexism (“you were in a man’s world, subject to contracts written by men, for men”), high-tech cheats, and corporate “financial dominance”—all enter into Goucher’s list of charges. Though Nike has denied the author’s allegations, it’s telling that Salazar’s name has been stricken from a building on the company’s campus.
Goucher makes a strong case against a powerful sports machine.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179144
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2023
Strictly for dittoheads.
An unabashed celebration of the late talking head.
Rush Limbaugh (1951-2021) insisted that he had a direct line to God, who blessed him with brilliance unseen since the time of the Messiah. In his tribute, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis calls him “the greatest broadcaster that [sic] ever lived.” That’s an accidental anointment, given checkered beginnings. Limbaugh himself records that, after earning a failing grade for not properly outlining a speech, he dropped out of college—doubtless the cause of his scorn for higher education. This book is a constant gush of cult-of-personality praise, with tributes from Ben Carson, Mike Pence, Donald Trump, and others. One radio caller called Limbaugh “practically perfect” and a latter-day George Washington by virtue of “the magnetism and the trust and the belief of all the people.” Limbaugh insists that conservatives are all about love, though he filled the airwaves with bitter, divisive invective about the evils of liberals, as with this tidbit: “to liberals, the Bill of Rights is horrible, the Bill of Rights grants citizens freedom….The Bill of Rights limits the federal government, and that’s negative to a socialist like Obama.” Moreover, “to Democrats, America’s heartland is ‘flyover’ country. They don’t know, or like, the Americans who live there, or their values.” Worse still for a money machine like Limbaugh, who flew over that heartland in a private jet while smoking fat cigars, liberals like Obama are “trying to socialize profit so that [they] can claim it”—anathema to wealthy Republicans, who prefer to socialize risk by way of bailouts while keeping the profits for themselves. Limbaugh fans will certainly eat this up, though a segment of the Republican caucus in Congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene et al.) might want to read past Limbaugh’s repeated insistence that “peace can’t be achieved by ‘developing an understanding’ with the Russian people.”
Strictly for dittoheads.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 9781668001844
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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