Game Over

Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond
Brooklyn : Melville House, [2014]
178 p.; 20cm.

In late summer this year, I heard Steve Almond on several talk shows [you can hear him talking with the superb Dave Zirin at the 13 minute mark here] discussing this book, Against Football.  Hearing him talk about the moral problems of being a fan of football was interesting, especially because he was a devoted and obsessed fan of professional football, mainly of the Oakland Raiders.  He brought to the discussion an element missing in some criticisms of football - a passion for the thrills of the game for the fans.

To my mind, Almond has written a powerful and passionate denunciation of the popular love of football by the American public - something that polling data backs up.  Almond manages in this short [178 p.] manifesto to expose football as a brutal [even lethal] sport that embodies many of the shortcomings of US society - sexism, racism, militarism, and unbridled capitalist greed.  However, he also tries to explain why it is such an appealing sport for millions of fans.  He backs his critiques up with facts and data that are hard to dispute. 

Of course many fans will be angry or frustrated with Almond's critique.  Any fan reading this book, will have to confront that their support of football, is a support for a sport that ravages the brains and the bodies of its players [including this tragic injury at a nearby high school this fall].  For those reluctant to give up football, I would suggest checking out this moving video from Time magazine which explains a lot about CTE - the brain injury that is a direct result of football violence and is at the heart of the injury crisis confronting football.

Want to keep watching, enjoying football?  If you do, you at least owe it to yourself and your conscience to read this passionate renunciation of American football.

The War to End All War Protests

From LOC

Unraveling Freedom by Ann Bausum
Washington, D.C. : National Geographic, c2010.
88 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 26 cm.

This is one of those short, but visually stunning and well written books that National Geographic has been putting out for young readers (e.g. photobiographies Bylines & Knockout about Nelly Bly & Joe Louis, respectively, or Denied, Detained, Deported about abuses of US immigration).

I really enjoyed reading this book for the way that Bausum brings alive the times of WWI and makes the assaults on liberties and freedoms by the US government feel very contemporary. She is good at comparing the various attempts to propagandize, censor, and stifle dissent to similar actions that have accompanied other US wars, including the latest "war on terror."

I was struck, in reading the book, at how US trends of anti-intellectualism and blind patriotism have strong roots in domestic policies during WWI.  In the frenzy of anti-German propaganda (see graphic above), not only was German language instruction virtually wiped out of the US education system, but over half the states banned teaching any foreign language.

There is a lot to recommend about this book to any student interested in US history during the period of WWI and its aftermath.

So-so Dystopia

The Diary of Pelly D by L.J. Adlington
New York : Greenwillow Books, 2008, c2005.
1st HarperTeen ed.
282 p. ; 19 cm.

Tony V runs a jackhammer on City V - just one of the five major cities on a planet colonized by humans long before his birth.  He is working on clearing the city for reconstruction following a war that devastated it.  While working Tony discovers the diary of a girl his age who was in that war. 

L.J. Adlington's novel is creative and clever - the citizens of this world have gills, water is at a premium, there are hints of corporatist totalitarianism and ethnic cleansing - but somehow I just found it not very compelling.  The author of the diary was a young, rich, shallow "it girl" until the civil war started that destroyed her privileged life.  A lot of the novel is the supposed text of this diary, which for me is just too much of the mundane ramblings of this imagined material girl.  The really compelling content of the unraveling of her life and society doesn't come about until the last part of the novel. 

The novel does offer a good starting point for discussing and thinking about civil conflict based on haves and have-nots and on manufactured ethnic conflict.

I read this book due to the glowing teen review of it in VOYA, but I have to agree with Tasha Saecker, of School Library Journal who writes, "The true horrors of what is happening are muted until the end of the book, taking away much of its power. The concept is interesting and the world of Tony V is well rendered, but in the end, the novel disappoints."  Exactly.