Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2015 - Science & Technology — Sports & Recreation — African and African American Studies

Looking through the lens of the life of tennis great Arthur Ashe (19431993), Hall (Georgia Southern Univ.) contributes to a wide array of histories: sport, political, social, labor, gender, and race.  This remarkably comprehensive book introduces readers not simply to Ashe the athlete and the person but also to Ashe the political activist, the labor organizer, and the civil rights crusader.  Hall paints a careful picture of the segregated Virginia in which Ashe grew up and the tensions he faced in struggling to determine how best to survive and then change white domination of tennis, the US, and South Africa.  Although Hall respects and admires Ashe, he offers a balanced, nuanced examination of a complicated subject, acknowledging the criticism, for example, of Ashes choice to compete in segregated South Africa and his lack of support for the womens liberation movement and for womens tennis.  This book is more than a biography; it is a window into the wider world that existed when Ashe was alive.  Halls research is meticulous, his contextualization of a life is impressive, and he writes his story clearly and deftly.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

In this important work about the racial dynamics that shape understandings of sport in the US, Martin (sociology and African and African American studies, Louisiana State Univ.) offers a thoroughly researched and insightful examination of a sport system that left behind the racial segregation of Jim Crow but left intact many of the underlying assumptions that fuel institutional racism.  Challenging the notion that sport is a post-racial space, Martin argues that walls of whiteness exist within the social institution of sport and that those walls continue to disadvantage black athletes.  She situates the institution of sport within the larger society, making seamless connections between contemporary issues affecting racial minorities in general with issues of access, opportunity, equality, and discrimination in sport.  Arguing that "the role of race is not tangential, it isfoundational (emphasis Martin's), she provides readers with clear and cogent examples of how sport, as an agent of racial socialization, works to maintain the status quo, thwarting efforts to move beyond race by reinventing, repackaging, and reproducing conceptions of whiteness and blackness.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.