pages b&w photos)
A brave sprint in the marathon of genetic racial equality.
Journalist and award-winning TV producer Entine writes lucidly about a forbidden topic. After O.J., it takes courage to discuss race science, nature vs. nurture, and brains vs. brawn. Sure, African-Americans dominate major American sports, but even black scholars here ask why every Olympic 100-meter finalist is black. The middle chapters explore the checkered history of blacks in America sports. Two centuries before the NBA, whites marveled at the slaves' superior athleticism. "Our sports and dances was big sport for the white folks," said one ex-slave. Readers discover that Paul Robeson, the actor-singer-communist, was an all-American and "the finest wide receiver of his era"—a Phi Beta Kappa valedictorian who went on to Columbia Law. Entine compares the defiant boxing champ Jack Johnson to Dennis Rodman. When he beat "the Great White Hope" in 1910, some whites consoled themselves with notions of their mental superiority. Jesse Owens's and Joe Louis's victories mocked theories of eugenics and white supremacy. The more recently fashionable environmental approach to the question is weakened by Michael Jordan's middle class background. After noting that Dodger executive Al Campanis and sportscaster Jimmy the Greek (who felt former slaves were bred to be athletic) lost their careers suggesting blacks were better athletes, Entine presents the evidence that makes his argument unusually ambitious and controversial: graphs of fast twitch muscles, comparisons of Scandinavian and African runners, and studies of the jumping ability of various races. (It’s true: White men really can’t jump.) The heavier bone density of whites may help them dominate swimming, though this is also one of the expensive, country club sports that Entine uses to present the sociological view. Courageous enough to ask tough questions about the uneven playing field, forthright enough to present hard evidence. (8
pages b&w photos)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-891620-39-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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