Goucher makes a strong case against a powerful sports machine.
A track-and-field star pulls the lid off the big money behind corporate sponsorship of sports.
In 2015, Goucher made news when, with her husband, a fellow Olympian, she accused Alberto Salazar, their coach at the Nike Oregon Project, of violating anti-doping rules. The abuse she chronicles in this book goes further than that. Entering distance running only eight years after the women’s marathon was made an Olympic event, Goucher was immediately confronted by issues of body image, and she imposed self-destructive rules against such things as eating more than 700 calories before dinner. Following the end of her NCAA collegiate eligibility, she won Nike’s sponsorship as a professional runner, a contract that paid little (to women, at least) and involved a range of demerits as well as incentives. The money would come to be an issue. So would the training regime imposed by Salazar, who, Goucher alleges, abused her sexually and psychologically but who was held in such reverence—he founded the Nike program in the same year that he was inducted into the National Track & Field Hall of Fame—that it was difficult to raise objections and be believed. A helpful team doctor, meanwhile, discovered a demographically improbable streak of hyperthyroidism through the team roster, for which he prescribed an energy-boosting drug that was allowed under anti-doping rules. Later, Goucher used a battery of prescribed “supplements” that probably violated the spirit but not the letter of the regulations. Racism against African runners, sexism (“you were in a man’s world, subject to contracts written by men, for men”), high-tech cheats, and corporate “financial dominance”—all enter into Goucher’s list of charges. Though Nike has denied the author’s allegations, it’s telling that Salazar’s name has been stricken from a building on the company’s campus.
Goucher makes a strong case against a powerful sports machine.Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179144
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2023
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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