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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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