An enjoyable romp through the things that helped make the sports we love.
An episodic, somewhat gimmicky, but always engaging history of American sports through material culture.
In this entertaining book, McKinsey & Company editor Murphy (Crazy ’08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History, 2007) explores American sports history through 100 different objects from a wide range of the American sporting experience—e.g., balls, articles of clothing, and various ephemera. In chapters of no more than a handful of pages (and sometimes a single page), building on one object from one year, the author shows how the objects of our sports and games take on historical significance based on their larger context. She does not aim for comprehensiveness, ignoring some important moments and athletes, but she provides wide coverage of sports and those who play them. She is especially effective at giving women’s sports their due, placing female athletes front and center in numerous entries. Murphy writes in a conversational, witty fashion, making wry observations without losing touch with the larger historical, social, and political significance of the events and athletes that give the objects their significance. The vast majority of her focus is on the 20th century, though she ranges as far back as the year 1100, examining a statue of a player of an indigenous game known as “chunkey.” She continues through 2016 with two objects: the sobering brain scans of an NFL player who was the victim of chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the inspiring medals from the Special Olympics. The approach is undoubtedly premised on a bit of a contrivance, but the book is a solid reference and will make a great bathroom book. It is a shame, however, that Murphy never mentions, even in passing, Gavin Mortimer’s two almost identically structured books, A History of Football in 100 Objects (2012) and A History of Cricket in 100 Objects (2013).
An enjoyable romp through the things that helped make the sports we love.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09774-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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