A penetrating probe into one of the most intriguing and misunderstood sporting stories of our time.
A fascinating investigation into the role of football in American Samoan culture and the role of Samoans in American football.
Depending on the statistic, Americans of Samoan descent are between 20 and 40 times more likely than any other Americans to play in the NFL. The Samoan diaspora has extended from the small Pacific island northeast to Hawaii, to the West Coast and inland to Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and elsewhere. Sports historian and documentarian Ruck (History/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game, 2011, etc.) combines historical scholarship, ethnography, sociology, travelogue, and reportage to tell the story of the growth of football in Samoa and among Samoans. Rejecting biological determinism, the author attributes the success of Samoans in football and other sports to “fa‘a Samoa,” the way of Samoa, which stresses the importance of hard work, discipline, competition, community, respect, pain tolerance, and a warrior ethos. Cultural explanations, too, can have their limitations, but Ruck generally avoids reductionism in telling myriad stories of Samoans who flourished both in college football and the NFL and also others who returned to Samoa to teach or coach or who became leaders elsewhere. The author provides a solid history of American Samoa while showing how American sporting impulses took over after World War II, with football holding particular appeal among Samoan boys. At the same time, he shows how contemporary Samoa faces myriad health crises, including extreme rates of obesity and associated issues like diabetes, kidney failure, and the like, as well as challenges to fa‘a Samoa. Further, he reminds readers that football’s downsides can be all the worse in a place where concussion baseline tests are unheard of, where players wear helmets sent from the mainland that would not pass safety tests, and where, for all of the successes (Junior Seau, Troy Polamalu, and others), most players never get anywhere near a college or professional field.
A penetrating probe into one of the most intriguing and misunderstood sporting stories of our time.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-337-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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