A compelling and essential story of one of the most significant evolutions in sports.
A work of sports history that fills in the gaps in the integration story of college football.
The racial integration of college football was not a moment, but a decade-long process. It happened in fits and starts, tempered by unspoken quotas that kept programs from recruiting more than a couple of Black players at a time. “The dominoes started falling separately,” observes Shanahan, a sportswriter, in his preface, “but undercurrents connected them. By the end of the decade the tributaries flowed together with [the] force of the mighty Mississippi spilling into modern football’s predominantly Black rosters.” A key figure in the author’s telling is Michigan State’s head coach, Duffy Daugherty, who not only recruited numerous Black players for his team but also helped launch the careers of Black coaches such as Sherman Lewis and Jimmy Raye. Shanahan also profiles several groundbreaking players from across the country, including “Wonderous Warren” McVea, the running back who, while at the University of Houston, became the first Black player for any major university in Texas, and Jerry LeVias, the diminutive wide receiver who, by playing for Southern Methodist University, integrated the Southwest Conference. The author also dismantles some of the folk history surrounding integration. For example, he argues that the 1970 season opener between the integrated University of Southern California teamand the all-white University of Alabama squad, which has since been held up as a watershed moment for integration, was not considered one at the time, and that USC was not even a particularly progressive program on that front. Shanahan’s prose is breezy, and his account is full of unexpected subplots, such as Daugherty’s commitment to incorporating Hawaiian and Samoan players as well: “Daugherty and [Tom] Kaulukukui struck up a friendship when Michigan State played at Hawaii, in 1947. Once Daugherty was named head coach, he told Kaulukukui anytime there was a player in Hawaii with Big Ten talent, he’d save a scholarship for him.” It’s a fascinating read that helps contextualize college football within the wider Civil Rights Movement, demonstrating the often-sporadic nature of institutional change.
A compelling and essential story of one of the most significant evolutions in sports.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781938532733
Page Count: 400
Publisher: August Publications
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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