Members' Online Book Borrowing Platform

The half century since the Ethiopian marathon runner, Abebe Bikila, won the Olympic gold medal in world record time in Rome in 1960 has been a golden period for African athletics. Since then, Africans have won 57 Olympic gold medals, numerous IAAF World Championships gold and established a string of world records in international competition. Most, but not all, come from the Eastern African highlands of Kenya and Ethiopia with other notable successes from Mediterranean athletes especially Morocco; and they are amongst the very elite of the world s athletes. Running for Black Gold documents in both text and statistics the African dominance in the middle and long distance events in international athletics competition, highlighting the successes of over 100 male and female athletes, their gold medals and world records. Amateur sportsman and writer Kevin Lillis focuses on the on-track performances of these athletes at the Olympic Games and the IAAF World Championships exclusively, as the black gold standard against which supreme performance is measured. Written from the viewpoint of a keen observer of both Africa and athletics, Lillis provides a broad map of the key moments in the history of African runners running for black gold culminating in the dominance of the Kenyans at the last IAAF World Championships in Daegu, Korea. The text and accompanying statistics are illustrated with stunning photographs of the outstanding gold medal winners and world record holders by internationally acclaimed photographer Mark Shearman. Sports enthusiasts especially those with an interest in the development of African athletics and the history of the Olympics as well as journalists, broadcasters and sport statisticians will revel in this revealing and easily read account of African athletics achievement from Bikila to Bekele .

ISBN-13: 9789766375980

ISBN-10: None

Language: English

Publisher:

Year: 2012

Pages: None

Cataloged: Dec. 2, 2024, 6:16 p.m.

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year As seen on the Netflix series Explained From the best-selling author of Cosmopolitanism comes this revealing exploration of how the collective identities that shape our polarized world are riddled with contradiction. Who do you think you are? That’s a question bound up in another: What do you think you are? Gender. Religion. Race. Nationality. Class. Culture. Such affiliations give contours to our sense of self, and shape our polarized world. Yet the collective identities they spawn are riddled with contradictions, and cratered with falsehoods. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind is an incandescent exploration of the nature and history of the identities that define us. It challenges our assumptions about how identities work. We all know there are conflicts between identities, but Appiah shows how identities are created by conflict. Religion, he demonstrates, gains power because it isn’t primarily about belief. Our everyday notions of race are the detritus of discarded nineteenth-century science. Our cherished concept of the sovereign nation—of self-rule—is incoherent and unstable. Class systems can become entrenched by efforts to reform them. Even the very idea of Western culture is a shimmering mirage. From Anton Wilhelm Amo, the eighteenth-century African child who miraculously became an eminent European philosopher before retiring back to Africa, to Italo Svevo, the literary marvel who changed citizenship without leaving home, to Appiah’s own father, Joseph, an anticolonial firebrand who was ready to give his life for a nation that did not yet exist, Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with vibrant narratives to expose the myths behind our collective identities. These “mistaken identities,” Appiah explains, can fuel some of our worst atrocities—from chattel slavery to genocide. And yet, he argues that social identities aren’t something we can simply do away with. They can usher in moral progress and bring significance to our lives by connecting the small scale of our daily existence with larger movements, causes, and concerns. Elaborating a bold and clarifying new theory of identity, The Lies That Bind is a ringing philosophical statement for the anxious, conflict-ridden twenty-first century. This book will transform the way we think about who—and what—“we” are. Source: Publisher

ISBN-13: 9781631493843

ISBN-10: 1631493841

Language: English

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Year: 2018

Pages: 272

Cataloged: Dec. 2, 2024, 3:31 p.m.