Rating: 
Summary: A megaphone for academic elites
Review: This book contains several diatribes against Christians. No other religious group is condemned. Thoughtful people need to be careful not to finance prejudice by buying books like this one. I found this book at my local library. When everyone is being so sensitive about issues such as race and religion, why would an author take such a risk? The answer is to be found in the relationship between the author and his subject matter. He presents the genetic and anthropological evidence for the dominance of black athletes in some sports. He is able to link the leading athletes from a sport to specific, localized regions in Africa. But the author has no scientific credentials. A problem? Not if he acts as a megaphone for the academic elites, the scientists who do have the credentials. He is forced to reference them hundreds of times. But these elites do not want to be seen as being racist. They have already been pilloried by their leftist academic peers for daring to study genetic differences in humans. And the author does not want to be a pariah of his liberal friends in journalism. No problem! He takes fully half of the book to present a judgemental history, from leftist academic historians, of blacks in sports. He condemns whites ad nauseum, especially white Christians, and compares their supposed opinions 100 years ago to the moral standards of the present day. One wonders if the hateful opinions expressed in this book will be respected 100 years from now, under the standards of the future.
Rating: 
Summary: so sorry, a misguided book....
Review: When I was writing a review to this book one year ago, I actually had no idea, how grotesque it is. I can't forgo one more opportunity and cut one star down. Firstly, half the book can be summarized by three words: blah, blah, blah... Really, don't expect any deep analysis and too much data. The book can be useful for you, only if you want to use it as a very expensive list of references. Although the section "NOTES" contains a list of almost all available research, about half the studies is not cited at all and from the rest just a drop of information. After I have recently got to nearly all these studies, there are three explanations that occur to me, when I am to explain the author's motivation during writing this book: 1/ The author may not be mentally normal. 2/ The author didn't read it and listed it only because he wanted to make bigger impression on readers. 3/ The author did read it, but he excluded inconvenient facts or those facts that he was not able to understand. According to recent Entine's articles, all three explanations are possible.Further, I would especially stress Entine's animosity that goes through the whole book and makes some passages either incredibly mendacious or laughable (which depends on the degree of elaboration of his demogogy). Although I can appreciate that there was eventually written a book that deals with such an interesting topic like racial differences in sports performance, I can't agree with that this topic got into hands of somebody, who doesn't bother to keep decent objectivity and who also doesn't bother to undertake deeper research and analysis. Instead of solid scientific evidence, Entine covers tens of pages by silly anecdotes, yeasty twaddle and intellectual exhibitions that often have nothing in common with the topic. By the way, out of all those moving anecdotes in the book, my favourite is that about white kids, who desperately practise their basketball skills in summer camps, but the group that tends to be really athletic, is "more and more the black one". This explains, why the best white players in NBA are Europeans, because all these white American kids die from overtraining before reaching maturity and thus they can't be responsible for the recent decrease of the black players' percentage in NBA. Or there may be another reason that Entine overlooked during philosophizing over faster motor development in black children: that children with slower motor development are unwillingly discriminated in tailent tests and are often lost for high level sports. This is a well-documented fact that must have a marked influence on the tailent selection during adolescence in mixed black and white communities. To summarize the topic in several sentences (which Entine wasn't able to do on 400 pages): There really exist differences in short-term performance between populations of European and West African ancestry. West Africans have about 8% more fast-twitch fibers in their thighs and this difference is about 5% between African-Americans and Europeans due to some mixing. In untrained subjects the highest difference in performance was found in vertical jump (about 7-10%), followed by sprint (40 y dash: 0,2 s, i.e. 4%). On the other hand, it was repeatedly confirmed that there exist no differences in tests of agility (sprints with changes of direction), probably due to long-legged African constitution that impairs stability and coordination. It is worth note that performance in collective sports relies more on the combination of speed and agility than on speed by itself. West Africans also tend to have lower endurance capacity than Europeans, which explains their lack of success in endurance sports. Further, the superior performance of East and South African populations in long-distance running seems to lie almost entirely in their better running economy resulting from their slender physique. However, there exist quite marked physiological differences between runners from South and East Africa, which is worth further investigation. Entine's statement that their better running performance gives them an edge in more endurance sports only confirms the comical "depth" of his research; for example, cross-country skiers have a different physique than distance runners; in cycling (on a flat terrain) there is no need for running economy, but for a better ratio between power output and frontal drag (which favorizes larger cyclists, not figures like H. Gebreselassie); rowing and triathlon really aren't good sports of choice for Kenyans either. The premium of Europeans are generally sports that rely on strength or strength+endurance. Their physiology and morphology is in a way unique, because it's the most variable in comparison with all other human races. In theory it means that Europeans have the most universal predispositions for sports participation (which is confirmed even in praxis). However, there exist some sports requiring extreme physical or physiological predispositions, where whites have less percentage of potential talents. The main reason of the lack of sports success of Asians is their smaller body size. Moreover, their physical variability is the lowest. And, eventually, I would remark that in collective games, there are no extreme trends towards a special muscle fiber composition, because performance primarily depends on a large number (mainly psychomoric) qualities. Sure, FT fibers are a general advantage of African-Americans in basketball, but the major reason of their sports dominance in USA is that its white population doesn't bother to compete (which is clear to everybody outside US, but not to Americans). See also my summary "Booboo: Why some athletes dominate some sports" that will apear in the net soon (www.webpark.cz/booboo/booboo.htm). Here you will also find another corrections of phantasies appearing in Entine's book.
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