A visceral and direct style makes readers feel the nap of a very rough place in which to survive, let alone grow up.
Local newspaperman Powell empathetically portrays the heavy load shouldered by those involved with Pop Warner football in Miami.
It may be for little kids, but it’s no small potatoes in Greater Miami, where Pop Warner teams regularly field national champions in all weight divisions. Powell was curious. What role did these teams play in the poorest big city in America? Why were so many teams composed exclusively of black players, and why were they so serious? So he spent a year attending practices, rallies, pre-games, games, and post-games, talking with players, coaches, and parents. Although the author is digging for a story, his narrative is more personal than journalistic. Powell has very clear and raspy opinions on the nature of Miami’s Pop Warner. The positives are obvious: kids get to have some fun in a place where fun comes at a premium; they learn to play together and focus their energies; the games bring a little light to decimated neighborhoods, showcase some superior talent, and offer one of the few roads out of poor, black Miami. There are also the standard problems of over-competitive coaches, parents who wish to live vicariously through their kids, and kids just dumped and left. But Pop Warner in Miami has a few other extraordinarily unfortunate features. One is the poaching of players from other neighborhoods, a twisted trickling down of professionalism to the sandlots; another is the presence of gang members, who bet and bribe and aren’t afraid to loose a few rounds if it will end a game not going their way. Throughout, Powell draws a sharp portrait of Miami: one resident tells him living there is “almost—not quite, but almost—like it was being black in the fifties and the sixties”; another explains that, politically, “in this town, if you’re not Cuban, you’re nothing.”
A visceral and direct style makes readers feel the nap of a very rough place in which to survive, let alone grow up.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2003
ISBN: 0-87113-905-7
Page Count: 190
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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