Carry the Rock

September 1, 2010

Fifty years after the first nine black students at Little Rock's Central High were escorted into the Arkansas school by National Guard troops, Little Rock native and resident Jennings (former reporter, Sports Illustrated; editor, Tennis and the Meaning of Life) spent the 2007 football season with the Central football team. Through Jennings, we get to know Bernie Cox, the school's coach for the last 30 years, his assistant coaches, and, to a lesser extent, his players. The first third of the book leaps back and forth in time to a confusing degree between the lackluster present and the town's racial history. The author portrays a city still divided by race along the layout of the freeway through town and through local school board politics, often bisected neatly along racial lines as well. However, the mixing of high school football and urban sociology do not mesh with much resonance here for either football fans or general readers. VERDICT Not particularly revealing, this book may be of greatest interest in the region of its subject.--John Maxymuk, Rutgers Univ. Lib., Camden, NJ

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2010
High-school sportslike sports at every levelare seldom just about competition. Politics, money, ambition, and race are often as important as speed and strength. Jennings, a Sports Illustrated veteran, shadowed the football program at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, during the 2007 season. It wasnt just any season; it was the fiftieth anniversary of the 1957 integration of the school. He traces the tumultuous racial machinations of the Little Rock school district through the years, noting the white migration to the suburbs and the rise of private schools, which serve as a haven for those who wish to avoid the mostly black public-school system. In this often-difficult environment, head coach Bernie Cox built a football powerhouse around discipline, accountability, citizenship, and tradition. But the anniversary year of 2007 would not be an easy one. The kids, seemingly divorced from the winning tradition, never bonded as teammates or, perhaps, were just not as talented as their predecessors. Jennings takes readers on a thoughtful, sometimes disheartening tour of urban high-school athletics, a tour that provides no answers but raises all the right questions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)