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THE GREAT DEMOGRAPHIC ILLUSION

MAJORITY, MINORITY, AND THE EXPANDING AMERICAN MAINSTREAM

A heartening, wise, and profoundly important counternarrative to hysteria.

A sociologist offers an optimistic, densely argued text about why ethno-racial assimilation will continue to be a part of the American future—and why it’s beneficial and important for the nation.

Few readers will fail to find themselves in this deeply informed book. Alba’s core argument, based on deep demographic research and sociological and historical knowledge, is that the U.S. is not splitting into two distinct populations. Instead, with the exception of African Americans, the integration of new groups into old continues without the loss of groups’ and individuals’ ethno-racial identifications—all very much in the American tradition. Yet even here, black Americans, who identify themselves more with the minority than majority, are making progress. The result is the “prospect of a new kind of societal majority,” one in which, as happened with Catholics and Jews after World War II, the ever broadening mainstream accepts “a visible degree of racial diversity.” From this fact, Alba offers a new narrative “of immigrant-group assimilation,” and he assesses the validity of current controversies over immigration and amalgamation. In arriving at his conclusions, the author sharply criticizes Census Bureau demographic data and statistical analyses for folding the children of mixed marriages into the “non-white” category when many of them consider themselves “white.” This error, he argues, embodies a rigid, outmoded classification of race and ethnicity. It also undermeasures the degree and pace of these changes because “a substantial fraction of these ‘minority’ children will have a white parent.” Yet for all Alba’s optimism, he knows that the process of assimilation now under way won’t be completed until equality and inclusion increase. To that end, he proposes clear social policies that he believes will hasten the process, most of them focusing on directly addressing racism, economic inequality, and educational opportunity.

A heartening, wise, and profoundly important counternarrative to hysteria.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-691-20211-2

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Princeton Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

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FOOTBALL

A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.

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A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.

Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.

A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.

Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026

ISBN: 9780593490648

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025

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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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