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THEY CLEARED THE LANE

THE NBA’S BLACK PIONEERS

A good introduction to the men who revolutionized the NBA. (20 b&w photos)

San Francisco Examiner sportswriter Thomas debuts with a minutely detailed history of the integration of the National Basketball Association.

When the Basketball Association of America merged with the National Basketball League to form the NBA in 1949, neither group had black players. The next year, New York Knickerbockers owner Ned Irish pressured the NBA’s board of governors to allow him to purchase the contract of Harlem Globetrotters star Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton. The board also voted to permit the drafting of two college players, Duquesne University's Charles Cooper and West Virginia State's Earl Lloyd. The Boston Celtics picked Cooper in the second round, but Lloyd (who went to the Washington Capitols in the ninth round) is generally credited as the first African-American player because his opening game was one night earlier. Clifton, whose Knicks contract was signed nine days after the 1950 draft, was the most talented of the newcomers and led his team to three straight NBA finals. While the extreme racial prejudice that had greeted Jackie Robinson in 1947 was fading, players still faced separate and unequal facilities. Each year of the ’50s saw more African-Americans enter the league (an excellent appendix lists them from 1950–65), but by the early ’60s, quotas of four blacks per team were an unspoken rule. Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Elgin Baylor, and Wilt Chamberlain came into the league in the late ’50s; their brilliant skills attracted white crowds and led to African-American dominance of the league. The first three black coaches, Russell, Al Attles, and Lenny Wilkens, led their teams to NBA titles, but Thomas gives precedence to Hall of Fame coach John McLendon, who studied in 1933 with John Naismith, the inventor of the game, and was the first African-American to lead an integrated team; he also taught Dean Smith, Michael Jordan's coach at the University of North Carolina.

A good introduction to the men who revolutionized the NBA. (20 b&w photos)

Pub Date: May 16, 2002

ISBN: 0-8032-4437-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.

It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.

Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.

Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0

Page Count: 432

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019

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