Reviews: Until It Hurts and more
This week in The Sun, Towson University English professor Diane Scharper provides capsule reviews of four books with a Maryland connection. The topics range from kids' sports to the Mideast crisis.
Until It Hurts By Mark Hyman (Beacon / 160 pages / $23.95). Sports programs for children aren’t about kids having fun. As Hyman sees it, they’re a means to an end. His latest book offers an eye-opening look at youth sports. from its inception to the present. The YMCA introduced youth sports in the 1880s to encourage moral fitness; by 1903, the Public Schools Athletic League used sports to lower the crime rate; in the 1920s, the American Legion pushed sports to encourage patriotic values. Even Carl Stoz’s Little League, which made its debut in 1939, hoped to promote virtues of sportsmanship — as well as to help Stotz financially. By the 1950s, youth sports was already a monster. Hyman, a Baltimore resident, sportswriter, coach and parent, interviews educators, doctors, major league baseball players, parents and kids who say that children’s organized sports do more harm than good. According to Hyman, it’s about competitiveness, greed, college scholarships and adults wanting to bask in reflected glory.
My Hope for Peace By Jehan Sadat (Free Press / 224 pages / $25). To many Westerners, the Taliban is synonymous with Islam, and burka-clad women are mute archetypes of Arab feminism. Not true, says Dr. Jehan Sadat, widow of former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated in 1981. In this thought-provoking book, she corrects misconceptions about Islam as she examines similarities and differences between Muslims and Westerners. Although Islamic customs are more conservative regarding relations between unmarried men and women, Sadat offers no apologies — given the divorce rate in the West. A Senior Fellow with the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, Sadat does not equate feminism with promiscuity as, she alleges, do many Westerners. She believes one can be a devout Muslim woman while being both emancipated and educated. Her life and example offer eloquent testimony to that notion.
Becoming Billie Holiday, poems by Carol Boston Weatherford, art by Floyd Cooper (Wordsong / 117 pages / $19.95). These brief, first-person poems — many titled after Billie Holiday’s songs — tell the story of Eleanora Fagan, who, although she grew up impoverished on Durham Street in a rough East Baltimore neighborhood, yet became a world-renowned jazz singer. With little education and no vocal training, Billie Holiday (she changed her name when she began singing) had an obsessive love for jazz, an excellent ear for rhythm and a voice that, Weatherford suggests, was almost able to float. This ability and her strong sense of drama resulted in hits like the harrowing protest song about black lynching, “Strange Fruit,” and the prayerlike paean to childhood, “God Bless the Child.” Weatherford (originally from Baltimore) translates pivotal moments from Holiday’s youth to mid-20s into sharply detailed, ironic poems. Coupled with Floyd Cooper’s moody, impressionistic illustrations, the poems try to get inside the sensibilities of the legendary Lady Day. More often than not, they succeed.
Almost Home by Christine Gleason (Kaplan / 224 pages / $26.95). Dr. Christine Gleason cared for some very sick newborns at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was chief of neonatology. This gripping memoir tells their the stories and those of several other babies she treated in her approximately 30 years as intern, resident and medical doctor. There’s Jimmy, the boy with the sad eyes, born prematurely to a 15-year-old, unmarried mother who wanted nothing to do with her child until she held him as he lay dying. There’s Owen, whose death made Gleason think about quitting her specialty. There’s Patrick, who survived although he was considered nonviable as a 22-week gestation fetus weighing less than one pound. As Gleason describes the overwhelming medical problems and the extensive efforts of doctors and nurses, trying to bring babies back from the brink of death, her book takes on the tension of a well-paced adventure story.
Comments
I think Mark Hyman is right - adults have ruined youth sports.
Posted by: Kathy | April 18, 2009 9:35 AM