It’s a tribute to how much has changed that much of the book’s content will be shocking to readers under 30; it’s also a...
An exploration of the link between the feminist revolution and the role of women in sports, as embodied by one of the 20th century’s most iconic sports figures.
Ware (Title IX: A Brief History with Documents, 2006) would have been hard-pressed to choose a better lens through which to examine the transformation of women’s sports—from seldom participated-in activities to an ever-growing field of high-level athletic excellence—than tennis superstar and trailblazer Billie Jean King, whose victory over Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” was a major catalyst for that change. Though biography is not the primary focus, the author provides a full account of King’s life, touching on her early marriage to a man who would be more business partner than lover, her sexual confusion and ultimate coming out as a lesbian, and her indomitable drive to not only succeed in tennis, but to help the game of tennis succeed. King’s rise to prominence coincided with the passage of Title IX, a piece of legislation designed to prevent sexual discrimination in federally funded academic institutions that would have its most profound impact on sports. The narrative is by turns an account of the passage of the legislation and progression of women’s athletics, a theoretical discourse on second-wave feminism and sexuality as they relate to sports and a biography of the influential and controversial King, making it a book that works on multiple levels—a quality that also makes it somewhat jumbled. Though the historical details necessarily inform the theoretical dissertation, the balance between each element is uneven, making the narrative hard to categorize, even as it cogently argues that the passage of Title IX may actually have impeded the creation of a level playing field.
It’s a tribute to how much has changed that much of the book’s content will be shocking to readers under 30; it’s also a measure of how much remains to be done, given the “separate but equal” approach that still dominates sports today.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8078-3454-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2010
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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