A touch overlong, but a deeply reported and revealing look at the dire commercialization of American sports.
Buckle up for a wild ride through athletics, doping, and the hard-driving company paying $500 million to brand the U.S. track and field team until at least 2040.
Nike, writes freelance journalist Hart, is “possibly the most recognizable brand on the planet, and its co-founder Phil Knight is one of the richest men to have ever lived, with a net worth estimated by Forbes of $35 billion.” The company is a marketing juggernaut particularly adept at getting famous athletes to wear their apparel and gear so the rest of us will buy it. The magic continues to work despite major scandals involving Tiger Woods and Lance Armstrong. There’s a lot going on in this lengthy book—sometimes too much—but for the most part, the author succeeds in telling an exciting story of business and athletic malfeasance. He diligently follows the rise and fall of Alberto Salazar, the coach of the company’s secret running program, the Nike Oregon Project. Despite widespread evidence of doping and abundant whistleblowing, Salazar received only a four-year ban in 2019. Hart is the perfect person to tell the tale; in 2017, someone leaked him the Salazar doping report, and the New York Times asked him to write it up. He recounts the long process of tracking Salazar’s activities, as he continued to stuff his athletes with all manner of drugs while bending the rules to their breaking points—e.g., having them diagnosed with hypothyroidism by his pet endocrinologist so they could take “off-label…prescription drugs as performance enhancers.” At one point in his career, distance runner Mo Farah was taking 100,000 IUs of vitamin D per week (recommended weekly intake is 4,200), plus calcitonin, a bone strengthener; ferrous sulfate, an iron supplement; and L-carnitine infusions. Even if the penalty for Salazar was meager, the stakes remain high, and Hart successfully uncovers an unsettling, aggressive corporate culture.
A touch overlong, but a deeply reported and revealing look at the dire commercialization of American sports.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-291777-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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