A long, winding road of sport and money supported by thorough research.
A journey through the history of money in collegiate athletics.
Today, when we think of an egregious violation of college athletic rules, we might imagine an assistant basketball coach handing a sack of cash to a star recruit’s parents. Earlier in the history of college sports, however, it took much less to create a scandal—e.g., hiring a professional coach or offering athletic scholarships. Examining the history of such scholarships, Smith takes us back to the turn of the 20th century and a collegiate sports landscape ruled by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. (Yes, a lot has changed). The guiding philosophical conflict was fascinating: to play sport for the sake of sport and the nobility of the competition, like the English universities Cambridge and Oxford? Or to embrace the American credo of winning at all costs in the name of such elusive concepts as freedom and equality? Few will be surprised by which side won that argument. The author shows us how we arrived here. In 1889, a pivotal year, a Princeton football recruit, writes Smith, “was offered a scholarship and was told another scholarship was available ‘for any particular friend that you might have.’ ” In 1948, the NCAA passed the Sanity Code, “the first NCAA attempt to limit athletic scholarships and control athlete recruiting.” The author combs through the subsequent decades, when scholarships became a foregone conclusion and real cheating (coaches paying parents) became more of a concern. The prose is rather dry and academic, and Smith has a tendency to digress. However, the research reveals a mind that has been exploring this subject for a long time. By the time he gets to more contemporary matters, such as college athletes’ battle to be compensated for use of their likenesses, the author has covered an impressive stretch of time and topics.
A long, winding road of sport and money supported by thorough research.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4773-2286-4
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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