A heartfelt, inspiring story of the world’s most unconventional soccer team.
One woman’s story of getting to know a legendary South African women’s soccer team.
Duffy’s story begins in Boston in 2010, when she eagerly awaited the start of the FIFA World Cup. Duffy, a 51-year-old self-proclaimed “soccer freak,” received an email from a friend telling her about a soccer team in rural South Africa made up entirely of grandmothers, all of whom were Black. Duffy, herself a member of a soccer team of older women in Massachusetts, impulsively wrote to Rebecca “Beka” Ntsanwisi, the founder of the Grannies (official team name: Vakhegula Vakhegula), asking if their two outfits could be official sister teams. She began corresponding with Beka and worked to bring Vakhegula Vakhegula to America for some exhibition play in Lancaster, Massachusetts. She eventually met her new sports idols and learned about some of their struggles with poor health, disapproving relatives, the search for sponsorships, and so on. Duffy adroitly balances her narrative among these different topics, from the backstories of the individual athletes to the challenges of the game itself. In warm prose, Duffy describes a world of soccer in South Africa that can still be deeply sexist, juxtaposing this state of affairs against the tremendous impact the Grannies have had within their country and beyond. Duffy also does an excellent job of capturing Beka’s wisdom. “If you want to succeed in life, you have to suffer,” the team matriarch says at one such point; “you cannot just climb a mountain without struggling.” Readers will find the Grannies’ story genuinely touching. “I have been a happy woman since I have been playing football,” says 67-year-old Norah Mtileni. “I am living so well. My soul has settled.” This is a sports story full of extraordinary achievement that will likely make “soccer freaks” out of quite a few readers.
A heartfelt, inspiring story of the world’s most unconventional soccer team.Pub Date: May 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781538170175
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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