A significant deep dive into the queer historical evolution and significance of transgender athletes in organized sports.
How transgender and gender-nonconforming athletes changed the face of early-20th-century sports history.
In his debut book, journalist Waters traces the histories of acclaimed European athletes who defied preset sexual boundaries and publicly transitioned their genders. Set against the backdrop of World War II, amid Hitler’s rise to power and the excitement of the 1936 Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, the distinguished Olympians the author profiles were all assigned female at birth but struggled with emerging gender dysphoria. Zdeněk Koubek, a Czech athlete, was born female, but “eventually he’d understand himself not to be,” as he initially rejected and then developed a love of competitive sprinting. Waters focuses mostly on Koubek’s journey toward gender self-expression, which coincided with other athletes—e.g., self-described “tomboy” Mark Weston, an English javelin, discus, and shot-putting champion, and eminent cyclist Willy de Bruyn. Waters seamlessly integrates several other celebrated athletes into his report and cites the many challenges facing trans competitors, including the Nazi takeover of the queer community in 1930s Germany, where “trans and intersex people were judged to be ‘asocial’ [and] people on the margins of gender and sexuality were arrested, imprisoned, and, at times, dispatched to their deaths.” The bureaucratization of gender in sports manifested in the 1936 creation of Olympic sex-testing policies as a method to keep transgender athletes from participating in competitive sports. Waters further addresses these gender bias regulations in his conclusion, revisiting the life of a fully transitioned Koubek, who “dumped all the medals he’d won” in protest of verification testing. Densely factual, impeccably researched, and written with dramatic flair, this book intensively probes gender bias in the Olympics amid the rise of European midcentury fascism and the epic challenges to gender essentialism.
A significant deep dive into the queer historical evolution and significance of transgender athletes in organized sports.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9780374609818
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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