A workmanlike account of a fascinating time in American collegiate sports history.
Roberts (History/Purdue Univ.; Joe Louis, 2010, etc.) examines the legendary 1944 Army-Navy college football game.
Comparisons between football and war are as old as the game itself, but never more relevant than in this history of Coach Earl “Red” Blaik’s Army team and its historic defeat of Navy as World War II raged. The war and its need for manpower forced the suspension of most college athletics, but the belief that sports provided good training for soldiers and a needed morale boost for the public allowed some to continue in a limited capacity. The stakes were particularly high for the West Point cadets, who had to meet the academy’s rigid academic requirements in addition to their athletic commitments. Roberts brings a historian’s thoroughness to the subject, tracing Blaik’s transformation of the team through canny recruiting and the adoption of the new “T” formation that would revolutionize the game. Army’s main goal was to beat archrival Navy for the first time since 1938, with Blaik’s coaching skill and the efforts of players like future Heisman trophy winners “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis making it possible. With a season featuring student athletes who would soon graduate to the battlefield and alumni who were already serving on it, the inherent drama of the story keeps the narrative moving along. But though interest was surely high for the 1944 match-up between the nation’s top-ranked teams, Roberts falls short of providing convincing evidence for his argument that “never in the history of the sport would there be a more important game.”
A workmanlike account of a fascinating time in American collegiate sports history.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-51106-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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