An intriguing sports tale more suited to a magazine piece than a book.
An account of a little-known basketball game in which the opponents played as much against Jim Crow as each other.
One morning in March 1944 in the segregated South, an all-white team from the Duke University Medical School played an exhibition against the Eagles of the North Carolina College for Negroes. The game occurred in a mostly empty gym behind locked doors; even key school officials were left unawares. Most other facts about the game are less than clear, as no known documents survive. From the kindling of surviving participants’ memories, Ellsworth (African-American History and African Studies/Univ. of Michigan; Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, 1982) constructs a book heavy in historical context and biographical sketches but noticeably short on the particulars of the game referred to in the title. It’s not the author’s fault that the only reporter to witness the game tore up his notes or that the game registers and score sheets of Eagles coach John McLendon were lost by a former player. However, the brevity of the game account, which comes deep into a detail-laden narrative, would have benefited by greater disclosure of sources (it’s not always enough to tuck a note at the back). In order to get to the game, readers must travel distant byways (overseas with James Naismith, for instance), as the author gives significant space to an assemblage of characters that aren’t easily understood as significant. Many sports books bog down in play-by-play detail, but that’s not the problem here. Even so, like many sports books, the prose contains heightened language—e.g., “a juggernaut of speed and finesse that left opponents demolished, referees exhausted, and fans in awe”—and mentions of “revolution” and a “new kind of basketball.” Given the game’s clandestine nature, there’s little evidence that it changed societal perceptions. Again, no foul there.
An intriguing sports tale more suited to a magazine piece than a book.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-24461-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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