Whether Brazil’s national side wins or loses this World Cup in its backyard, one can be sure that the debate will endure...
How soccer shaped Brazil and how Brazil has shaped soccer.
As Brazil readies to host the World Cup, it also prepares for the world’s attention. Kittleson (History/Williams Coll.; The Practice of Politics in Postcolonial Brazil: Porto Allegre, 1845-1895, 2005) explores the development of soccer in Brazil and that country’s unique contributions to the world game. He also uses the game and many of its key Brazilian figures to explore the ways that soccer, society, culture, race, class, politics and nation have intersected in Brazilian history and helped to create the country. Though Brazilian fans expect to win, they also expect to do so in a particular way, a way that reflects brasilidade, Brazilianness, which in turn reflects a debate about futebol-arte (art soccer) versus futebol-força (strength soccer). The former embodies the idealized view Brazilians have of their own beautiful game, with its individual brilliance embodied in stars such as Garrincha, Pele, Ronaldo and others. The latter embodies a pragmatic, technical, European style of soccer. Central to all of these discussions is the role of race, as Afro-Brazilians are oftentimes seen as embodying futebol-arte even as Brazilian society is more riven by race than the country’s boosters acknowledge. Kittleson organizes the book chronologically, but within each chapter, he focuses on individuals who embody the period’s debates, styles of play and developments on the field. Thus, players take central stage, but so, too, do individual managers and cartolas—literally, “top hats,” but referring to the bosses who run the country’s top clubs and football infrastructure. In the process, Kittleson provides a work of both impeccable scholarship and compelling narrative.
Whether Brazil’s national side wins or loses this World Cup in its backyard, one can be sure that the debate will endure over how they won or lost and how it reflects or falls short of the ideals of brasilidade. This book provides a fine context to that debate.Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-520-27909-4
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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