On Wednesday, October 11 at 7pm, Left Bank Books presents acclaimed author, journalist and TV commentator Michael MacCambridge in conversation with Gerald Early, award-winning essayist, author, and professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Join us for discussion of "The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America." Joe Posnanski calls it "a book brimming with nostalgia and fun, filled with all the marvelous names that shaped my life as a sports fan." MacCambridge will personalize and sign copies after the presentation!
About the Book: Every decade brings change, but as Michael MacCambridge chronicles in THE BIG TIME, no decade in American sports history featured such convulsive cultural shifts as the 1970s. So many things happened during the decade--the move of sports into prime-time television, the beginning of athletes' gaining a sense of autonomy for their own careers, integration becoming--at least within sports--more of the rule than the exception, and the social revolution that brought females more decisively into sports, as athletes, coaches, executives, and spectators. More than politicians, musicians or actors, the decade in America was defined by its most exemplary athletes. The sweeping changes in the decade could be seen in the collective experience of Billie Jean King and Muhammad Ali, Henry Aaron and Julius Erving, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Joe Greene, Jack Nicklaus and Chris Evert, among others, who redefined the role of athletes and athletics in American culture. The Seventies witnessed the emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as dramatic changes in the way athletes were paid, portrayed, and packaged. In tracing the epic narrative of how American sports was transformed in the Seventies, a larger story emerges: of how America itself changed, and how spectator sports moved decisively on a trajectory toward what it has become today, the last truly "big tent" in American culture.
About the Presenters: Michael MacCambridge is an author, journalist and TV commentator, whose books have included the acclaimed "America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured A Nation" and "Chuck Noll: His Life's Work." For eight years a columnist and critic at the Austin American-Statesman, MacCambridge was later a contributor to "A New Literary History of America" and his work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, and GQ. The father of two children, Mile and Ella, he lives in Austin.
Gerald Early is Chair of African and African-American Studies and Professor of English at Washington University. He has written and edited numerous books, including "This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960s" and "The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture" which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism.
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https://www.left-bank.com/event/michael-maccambridge-big-time
