The organization is a little scattershot, but this is a fascinating subject deserving of further study, and Dohrmann...
A Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist turns his attention to those who identify obsessively with their teams.
Dohrmann (Play Their Hearts Out: A Coach, His Star Recruit, and the Youth Basketball Machine, 2010, etc.) doesn’t pretend to offer the last word on superfandom. Instead, he spotlights a field of study that is still in its infancy. He shows why the sort of fan studied by psychologists deserves more attention, at least partly because “sports is the rare piece of popular culture that exposes people of different cultures, races, religions and classes to one another, that brings them together on a large scale.” Though the author highlights some of the research and its conclusions, the liveliest parts are character studies of real people who devote their lives to their teams. Some seem to crave attention; others find an outlet for their artistic creativity; still others transfer their addictive tendencies to an obsession with sports. Many are displaced, and gathering with other fans far from where they first identified with the team reinforces their “place attachment.” In such cases as the Green Bay Packers and the Nebraska Cornhuskers, the place is prized for forging certain character values that the fans see the team as embodying—even as the ties between the players and the place might be increasingly tenuous. This is also the rare field of academic research where “these academics behave like the people they study. They know how the sausage is made and yet they still have ordered a double helping.” In other words, they are sports fans who seem to have a lot of fun studying other sports fans and who give presentations such as, “Your Team Stinks! The Impact of Team Identification on Biased Ratings of Odors.” The book runs the gamut from the seriously disturbed sports fanatic to those who find transcendence in a community that might even be more important than the team.
The organization is a little scattershot, but this is a fascinating subject deserving of further study, and Dohrmann provides a good jumping-off point.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-39421-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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