A suitably vibrant history of spectacular doings on—and above—the hardwood.
Naysayers can’t ground the coolest shot in basketball.
A staple of postgame shows and social media feeds, the slam dunk is omnipresent, but the opposite was once true, Sielski, a Philadelphia sportswriter and Kobe Bryant biographer, writes in this informative account. Consider the book’s cover star, Julius Erving, who wowed fans by leaping from the free-throw line, 15 feet from the hoop, and slamming the ball home. Born in 1950, “Dr. J” was never more athletic than in the early 1970s, but playing in the ABA, an upstart league without a national TV contract, “he was invisible,” a pro basketball executive tells Sielski. At least the ABA let him dunk. While at the University of Massachusetts, Erving, like every other college player from 1967 to 1976, was prohibited from dunking during games. Sielski shows that race was among the factors behind the purportedly safety-minded rule change. By the late 1960s, Black players like UCLA’s Lew Alcindor—he’d later change his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—were dominating the college game. The “Anti-Alcindor Rule,” as some called the dunk ban, was meant to temper his above-the-rim supremacy, and Abdul-Jabbar was among those who said the rule change wouldn’t have been implemented if he were white. Sielski chases a host of historical leads about early dunkers, yielding memorable, if not always verifiable, anecdotes. Joe Fortenberry, a college player in Texas, dunked in a 1930s game, but his coach said, “Joe, that’s not elegant” and forbade further dunks. Holding two basketballs and tossing a third in the air as he jumped, New York City phenom Connie Hawkins could dunk all three before landing. Sielski writes about great recent dunkers, but his chapters on Michael Jordan and Ja Morant offer little that will be new to fans.
A suitably vibrant history of spectacular doings on—and above—the hardwood.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781250287526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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