A compelling and essential story of one of the most significant evolutions in sports.
A work of sports history that fills in the gaps in the integration story of college football.
The racial integration of college football was not a moment, but a decade-long process. It happened in fits and starts, tempered by unspoken quotas that kept programs from recruiting more than a couple of Black players at a time. “The dominoes started falling separately,” observes Shanahan, a sportswriter, in his preface, “but undercurrents connected them. By the end of the decade the tributaries flowed together with [the] force of the mighty Mississippi spilling into modern football’s predominantly Black rosters.” A key figure in the author’s telling is Michigan State’s head coach, Duffy Daugherty, who not only recruited numerous Black players for his team but also helped launch the careers of Black coaches such as Sherman Lewis and Jimmy Raye. Shanahan also profiles several groundbreaking players from across the country, including “Wonderous Warren” McVea, the running back who, while at the University of Houston, became the first Black player for any major university in Texas, and Jerry LeVias, the diminutive wide receiver who, by playing for Southern Methodist University, integrated the Southwest Conference. The author also dismantles some of the folk history surrounding integration. For example, he argues that the 1970 season opener between the integrated University of Southern California teamand the all-white University of Alabama squad, which has since been held up as a watershed moment for integration, was not considered one at the time, and that USC was not even a particularly progressive program on that front. Shanahan’s prose is breezy, and his account is full of unexpected subplots, such as Daugherty’s commitment to incorporating Hawaiian and Samoan players as well: “Daugherty and [Tom] Kaulukukui struck up a friendship when Michigan State played at Hawaii, in 1947. Once Daugherty was named head coach, he told Kaulukukui anytime there was a player in Hawaii with Big Ten talent, he’d save a scholarship for him.” It’s a fascinating read that helps contextualize college football within the wider Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating the often-sporadic nature of institutional change.
A compelling and essential story of one of the most significant evolutions in sports.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781938532733
Page Count: 400
Publisher: August Publications
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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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