Michael Oriard is Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and
Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at Oregon State University. His books include
Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (2007),
King Football: Sport & Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies & Magazines, the Weekly & the Daily Press (2001), and
Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (1993), all from University of North Carolina Press.
Last week I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
The best book on football that I've read this fall is Sally Jenkins's The Real All-Americans, which nicely balances a Hollywood-ready triumphal tale of college football's ultimate underdogs, the Carlisle Indians of the 1890s and early 20th century, with a nuanced portrait of the school's superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt, a genuinely altruistic and rightly beloved father figure who nonetheless believed that the best thing he could do for his Indian students was to exterminate their native languages and cultures.
With a new day job in recent years as an associate dean instead of a professor of American literature, I have been reading impulsively outside my discipline in the evenings: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel; Charles Mann's 1491; Walter
Alvarez's T. Rex and the Crater of Doom; Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. I found Judt's nearly 900-page tome continuously engrossing, for reassembling the fractured map of post-Soviet eastern Europe but even more so for bringing home to me, over and over, the powerfully attractive alternative that western European social democracy poses to American capitalism -- and how neither system was inevitable but rather the consequence of political decisions made over the past half-century.
Learn
more about Michael Oriard and
his more recent books.
--Marshal Zeringue
Michael Oriard is Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at Oregon State University. His books include Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (2007), King Football: Sport & Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies & Magazines, the Weekly & the Daily Press (2001), and Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (1993), all from University of North Carolina Press.
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