"Basketball humanizes him": Noah Cohan on Obama, the game and The Audacity of Hoop in The Common Reader

 

Writing in Washington University's The Common Reader, American Cultural Studies scholar Noah Cohan looks at The Audacity of Hoop and concludes that "[Barack] Obama's association with basketball doesn't racialize him, it humanizes him." The book, Cohan writes, "cogently and poignantly demonstrates [basketball's] usefulness as a defining metaphor" for Obama's life and time in office, and author Alexander Wolff's text is "complemented by rich visuals." Read the entire review here.

 

The Audacity of Hoop featured on Sport in American History blog

 

"Wolff examines how the game helped cultivate Obama's personal and political character, but also how he has changed the game," says University of Virginia graduate student Alexander Hyres in his review of The Audacity of Hoop on the Sport in American History blog. The writing "is lively and accessible to readers with all levels of prior knowledge on the subject." Read the entire review here.

 

NewYorker.com on The Audacity of Hoop

 

In this piece on NewYorker.com, Ian Crouch weighs in on The Audacity of Hoop and what we can divine about Barack Obama through basketball after nearly seven years in office.

 

A historian's perspective on The Audacity of Hoop, from Chapter16.org

 

Aram Goudsouzian, chair of the Department of History at the University of Memphis, reviews The Audacity of Hoop in advance of author Alexander Wolff's November 17 appearance on the Vanderbilt campus. Chapter16.org is the online literary community maintained by Humanities Tennessee.

 

The New York Times Book Review highlights The Audacity of Hoop in its Holiday Books sports roundup

 

In a sports roundup for its December 6 Holiday Books issue, the New York Times Book Review's Ihsan Taylor praises The Audacity of Hoop, citing it as "a mosaic" with "an improvisational feel" that builds on author Alexander Wolff's 2009 Sports Illustrated article: "This book-length effort is fuller, richer in scope with the benefit of six more years of hindsight, and it's illustrated with a time capsule's worth of pictures, many of them by the longtime White House photographer Pete Souza. . . . What unifies it all are the evocative photographs . . . they're more sublime than splashy--proof that, even as Obama follows his presidential forebears to the first tee, it's basketball that made him, in the words of Ishmael Reed, 'the president of the Cool.'"

 

Diplomat Derek Shearer: The Audacity of Hoop is "in a class by itself"

 

In an end-of-year roundup of books at TheHuffingtonPost.com, Derek Shearer, director of the McKinnon Center for Global Affairs at Occidental College and former U.S. ambassador to Finland, calls The Audacity of Hoop "in a class by itself, and the perfect 'stocking stuffer' for any sports and political enthusiast." Read the full blog post here.