Black Planet by David Shields
The National Basketball Association is a place where white fans and black players enact virtually every racial issue and tension in U.S. culture. Following the Seattle SuperSonics for an entire season, David Shields explores how, in a predominantly black sport, white fans-including especially himself-think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, and black bodies. Critically acclaimed and highly controversial, Black Planet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN USA Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Nonfiction Books of 1999 by Esquire, Newsday, Los Angeles Weekly, and Amazon.com. David Shields is the author of several other books, including the novels Dead Languages and Heroes (available in a Bison Books edition). His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the Village Voice. Shields, a recent Guggenheim fellow, is a professor of English at the University of Washington. Gerald Graff is a professor of English and education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent books are Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind and (with Cathy Birkenstein) They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing.
“A beautiful book about basketball and fandom and America‘Your life isn’t real to me because it’s not my life’: How could this sentence, written more than twenty-five years ago, so perfectly describe reality right now? Black Planet is a call for each of us to take a hard look in the mirror.”-David Dudley, author of 800 Days of Solitude: A Conjuring
"One of the best books ever written on the subject of sport in America, which is to say a book that is about a great deal more than sport."—A.O. Scott, Newsday "A risky and brilliant book. . . . It is an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness. Shields is willing to write himself naked about the hungers and envies that move across the grandstand like the wave."—Robert Lipsyte, New York Times "Black Planet accomplishes a rare feat by tackling race head on."—Steven Hill, Chicago Tribune “Black Planet does the unexpected. It takes risks and says things that we know but have not articulated. A wonderful book.”-Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory
"One of the best books ever written on the subject of sport in America, which is to say a book that is about a great deal more than sport."—A.O. Scott, Newsday "A risky and brilliant book. . . . It is an emotional journey into Jock Culture's heart of darkness. Shields is willing to write himself naked about the hungers and envies that move across the grandstand like the wave."—Robert Lipsyte, New York Times "Black Planet accomplishes a rare feat by tackling race head on."—Steven Hill, Chicago Tribune “Black Planet does the unexpected. It takes risks and says things that we know but have not articulated. A wonderful book.”-Richard Rodriguez, author of Hunger of Memory
David Shields is the author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (named by Lit Hub in 2020 as one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), and Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN/Revson Award). Bryan Curtis is the editor-at-large of The Ringer and cohost of The Press Box podcast.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781496242211 |
| ISBN 10 | 1496242211 |
| Title | Black Planet |
| Author | David Shields |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | University of Nebraska Press |
| Year published | 2025-09-01 |
| Number of pages | 277 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |