A powerfully eloquent, concise book.
A Princeton professor of African American studies examines “Black democratic perfectionism” and its significance to the ongoing political struggle.
Glaude, the author of Begin Again and Democracy in Black, first presented this work at the 2011 Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Lecture Series. Though he had initially intended them as musings on how the Obama presidency had affected “the form and content of Black political struggle,” when revisiting the essays a decade later, he realized that the ideas they expressed had become even more germane in the aftermath of the Trump administration, the pandemic, and the concomitant resurgence of racism and xenophobia. His first essay explores “the role of the prophetic and the heroic in African American democratic life,” examining the work of Martin Luther King Jr. within a framework that also includes pragmatist John Dewey. King was no savior, writes the author. Rather, he was a flawed human who followed the stirrings of a powerful moral imagination and acted on ideals that had no guarantee of succeeding in the real world. In the second essay, Glaude turns his attention to Malcolm X. Using the Emersonian idea that society should limit its reliance on heroes, the author suggests that Malcolm X was a “wounded, vulnerable Black man” fighting within a collective for liberation rather than a “shining black prince.” The author concludes with an exploration of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organizer Ella Baker’s beliefs about leadership. Far from being magical or mythical, the power to enact change is a grassroots phenomenon that comes from individuals becoming “problem-solving agents” and acting collectively as servants of justice. Though they speak directly to tendencies within the ongoing Black political struggle, the wisdom these important essays offer about the true nature of democratic action is equally relevant to all Americans seeking to rebuild a ravaged democracy and its broken institutions.
A powerfully eloquent, concise book.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780674737600
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
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
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
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