Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love - Hardcover

Wideman, John Edgar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395857317 ISBN 13: 9780395857311

Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

Hoop Roots is John Edgar Wideman’s memoir of discovering the game that has been his singular passion for nearly fifty years. It is equally, inevitably, the story of the roots of black basketball in America — a story inextricable from race, culture, love, and home.
As a boy, Wideman lived in his grandparents’ worn but welcoming home in the ghettoized Homewood section of Pittsburgh. It was a world presided over by women, forever coddling, scolding, protective. One day John slipped away from their watchful gaze and escaped to a place where white factory workers shot hoops on their breaks. Then someone handed him a ball. That thrilling first shot was a turning point. Later he sneaked from his dying grandmother’s bedside to the courts where other black boys gathered. Here he really learned the game — the African-American game, whose style and power would change him and our culture.
With Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk as his model, Wideman combines memoir with history, folklore, and commentary to create a magical evocation of his unique slice of American experience. He imagines the Harlem Globetrotters in 1927, on their way to the Illinois town where the only black resident will be lynched. A playground game in Greenwich Village conjures Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, and the sources of black minstrelsy. African-American language, culture, music, and sport brilliantly interweave in a lyrical narrative that glides from nostalgic to outraged, from scholarly to streetwise, from defiant to celebratory.
Like his previous memoirs, Wideman’s Hoop Roots is both deeply personal and fiercely resonant.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Edgar Wideman won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His second memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are Hoop Roots and The Island: Martinique. He teaches at Brown University.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0395857317
• ISBN 13: 9780395857311
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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