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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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