Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season
David Shields
Three Rivers, $12.95 paperback, 240 pages

Throughout this collage basketball diary, David Shields immerses himself in the dysfunctional season of the 1994-95 Seattle SuperSonics, attending every home game, watching road games on TV, and spending hours listening to the incessant deconstruction of sports radio. While most contemporary sports literature either serves as an extension of slick marketing or descends into sentimentality, Black Planet drives straight for the uncomfortable racial undercurrents that run unspoken in both the NBA and American culture. In the book, a Shawn Kemp dunk or Gary Payton's swagger take on metaphorical significance larger than the game, becoming forums for Shields' investigation into the subtle racism of the NBA where black players perform for white audiences.

Spiraling towards a first round playoff implosion at the hands of the Lakers, the Sonics-underachieving, surly and idolized-and their uneasy chemistry provide the forum for Shield's meditation on white America's dual adoration and contempt for black superstars. Riffing on the aftershocks of the Sonics playoff collapse the year before, Shields notes: "The Sonics seem self conscious to me now in the way a couple does that has broken up but gets back together: unable to feel much anymore after they've talked the fucking thing to death." And, as the season progresses, it's Shield's observations of racial subtext on and off the court as well as within his own conflicted psyche-talked and trash-talked and talked over again-that blow open American preconceptions about race.

Some readers may be put off by the almost accusative tone of the book, Shields' constant refrain that even he is tinged by a form of racism that our consumer-driven and self-consciously PC culture attempts to gloss over or manipulate. Yet, in its accumulated and unrelenting honesty, Black Planet undermines this type of racism, advertised under the guise of inclusiveness, that our society is all too willing to accept.

-Douglas Schnitzspahn

Kate Bingham's first novel is a hushed and haunting tale of two generations of mothers and daughters. Ten-year-old Sarah is shipped off to a cousin's farm where she is swept into a magical, natural world, away from the London home where her mother, Catherine, has attempted suicide.

The story weaves through time, showing Catherine's own childhood, where her mother does not protect her from her stepfather, and Sarah's adult world, in which she goes through her yearly ritual of baking her mother a birthday cake, now seeing her mother's weakness and denial through new eyes. Through this cycle of mothers and lovers, of loss and coming of age, Bingham takes us into the slow-motion world of childhood, where the fate of a single trout or a stepfather's destruction of a first party dress are painful and vivid recollections, kept timelessly alive in the memory of each generation. Bingham's quiet, detailed style will leave you looking ahead to more work from this young British author.

-Rebecca Frank