Valuable background reading for anyone interested in sports activism.
A scholarly study of Black athletes’ protests in the 1960s and ’70s and their complex legacy.
Casual sports fans are likely familiar with Muhammad Ali’s activism and how track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised Black Power fists on the medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968. History professor Kaliss expands on those moments and explores how they were part of a larger effort among Black athletes and women to improve their status during the era, both within their sports and American society. A constant challenge among those protesters, the author shows, was determining how much to work with the system and how much to push against it. For instance, the Black Economic Union, led by star NFL running back Jim Brown from 1966 to 1973, provided financial support for individual Black businesses but paid little attention to systemic racism and ultimately fizzled. In 1969, 14 Black football players at the University of Wyoming were dismissed because of their work pressing for broader change. (The school formally apologized for its actions in 2019.) Forward movement, Kaliss observes, could only be achieved via half-measures—Billie Jean King, for instance, could only win better pay for women tennis pros by softening feminist rhetoric (and partnering with cigarette brand Virginia Slims). The tension between competing visions of progress played out vividly in Ali’s first championship bout with Joe Frazier, where, Kaliss writes, the two became proxies for different ideas of Black manhood and social protest. “Racial politics,” writes the author, “lay at the heart of the impassioned responses to the fight.” The text is well researched and engaging for an academic book. Indeed, a chapter on the ABA, a street-wise counterweight to the stuffier NBA, and its role as a precursor to the hip-hop era, deserves expansion into its own book.
Valuable background reading for anyone interested in sports activism.Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780252087066
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.
The Chicago Bulls stalwart tells all—and then some.
Hall of Famer Pippen opens with a long complaint: Yes, he’s a legend, but he got short shrift in the ESPN documentary about Michael Jordan and the Bulls, The Last Dance. Given that Jordan emerges as someone not quite friend enough to qualify as a frenemy, even though teammates for many years, the maltreatment is understandable. This book, Pippen allows, is his retort to a man who “was determined to prove to the current generation of fans that he was larger-than-life during his day—and still larger than LeBron James, the player many consider his equal, if not superior.” Coming from a hardscrabble little town in Arkansas and playing for a small college, Pippen enjoyed an unlikely rise to NBA stardom. He played alongside and against some of the greats, of whom he writes appreciatively (even Jordan). Readers will gain insight into the lives of characters such as Dennis Rodman, who “possessed an unbelievable basketball IQ,” and into the behind-the-scenes work that led to the Bulls dynasty, which ended only because, Pippen charges, the team’s management was so inept. Looking back on his early years, Pippen advocates paying college athletes. “Don’t give me any of that holier-than-thou student-athlete nonsense,” he writes. “These young men—and women—are athletes first, not students, and make up the labor that generates fortunes for their schools. They are, for lack of a better term, slaves.” The author also writes evenhandedly of the world outside basketball: “No matter how many championships I have won, and millions I have earned, I never forget the color of my skin and that some people in this world hate me just because of that.” Overall, the memoir is closely observed and uncommonly modest, given Pippen’s many successes, and it moves as swiftly as a playoff game.
Basketball fans will enjoy Pippen’s bird’s-eye view of some of the sport’s greatest contests.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982165-19-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
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