A thoughtful call for social justice as much as a story of striving for athletic excellence.
An action-packed yet reflective account of the quest for a high school basketball championship on and off a Montana Indian reservation.
“In rural Montana, on the weekend of the state tournament, small towns evacuate, their residents filling arenas designed for rock bands and college teams.” So writes Outside contributing editor Streep, setting the scene for a team on the Flathead Indian Reservation competing in Class C basketball, which “occupies emotional territory somewhere between escape and religion.” The Arlee Warriors lack nothing in the way of community support; when they travel for away games across the sprawling state, nearly half the Flathead Nation goes with them. In other matters, the players are less fortunate. The school is underfunded, the reservation plagued by poverty and addiction, and prejudice is seldom far below the surface beyond its borders. Much of the success of the Warriors can be attributed to the skillful coaching and encouragement of a young man named Zanen Pitts, who recognizes what his players are up against. “Out of the kids that people are afraid to give a chance to, I’d give this kid a chance,” he says of one of his students, a diligent and inventive player who gives his all off and on the court: “To watch him play was to become accustomed to surprise,” writes Streep. Other players have their own styles, some brash and attention-seeking, some shy but fearless. Readers will applaud the boys’ accomplishments against the long odds while shaking their heads at the many institutional and social obstacles placed in their way, not least of them lack of support from higher education. As the author documents, of 222 Montana students recruited for college athletics, “just one basketball player was Native American, a young woman.” With its excellent on-court set pieces and search for context, Streep’s book nicely bookends Michael Powell’s Canyon Dreams (2019), a story of basketball on the Navajo Reservation.
A thoughtful call for social justice as much as a story of striving for athletic excellence.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-21068-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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