Falls short as an examination of women’s attitudes toward sports, but with its enthusiasm for the game and its positive...
A friendly, close-up view of Montclair, New Jersey, soccer moms who became soccer-playing moms and discovered the joys and anguish of participating in a team sport.
New York Times sports columnist Araton lives in Montclair and is the husband of one of the women recruited in 1998 to join a beginners’ soccer group. Sports-loving physical therapist Lisa Ciardi rounded up enough other interested mothers to convince the operator of Ashley’s Soccer Camp, a local soccer program for kids, to begin offering training for women. Araton follows the soccer moms’ evolution from a friendly little group to a league of competing teams. Publicity brought in new players, including younger women whose school athletic programs had benefited from Title IX, the 1972 federal legislation guaranteeing equal athletic access for girls. As the more competitive, more aggressive younger women changed the game, Araton observes the varying reactions of the older moms. To provide some perspective on the issue of women’s attitudes toward competitive sports, he looks briefly at another group, suburban D.C.’s Mothers of Basketball, which forbids score-keeping, and at a couple of more established female soccer leagues in other cities. While Araton emphasizes the perceptions and experiences of the women themselves, he also notes the reactions of various husbands as soccer makes increasing demands on their wives’ time and attention, even on the family’s financial resources. Perhaps because he is a sports columnist, Araton devotes considerable space to individual games and to the personalities and performances of specific players, details that require substantial knowledge of soccer to fully appreciate.
Falls short as an examination of women’s attitudes toward sports, but with its enthusiasm for the game and its positive portraits of the players it may well please soccer fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-87390-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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