Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football.
Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault.
In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.
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Diane Roberts. (2015). Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Diane Roberts. 2015. Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Diane Roberts, Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. HarperCollins, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Diane Roberts. Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America. HarperCollins, 2015.
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Diane Roberts is a contributor to NPR, the Guardian, and the Oxford American, among many other publications. She is the author of three books, and her work has been anthologized in Best American Essays and Best American Food Writing. She holds a PhD from Oxford University and teaches literature and creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
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One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football.
Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault.
In Tribal, Roberts explores college football's grip on the country at the very moment when gender roles are blurring, social institutions are in flux, and the question of who is—and is not—an American is frequently challenged. For die-hard fans, the sport is a comfortable retreat into tradition, proof of our national virility, and a reflection of an America without troubling ambiguities. Yet, Roberts argues, it is also a representation of the buried heart of this country: a game and a culture built upon the dark past of the South, secrets so obvious they hide in plain sight. With her droll Southern voice and a phrase-turning style reminiscent of Roy Blount Jr. and Sarah Vowell, Roberts offers a sociological unpacking of the sport's dubious history that is at once affectionate and cautionary.
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- source: Will Blythe, New York Times bestselling author of To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever
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"Tribal is a lover's quarrel with college football so raucous, so entertainingly appalled, and so wise that it goes down as easily as a shot of bourbon from a smuggled flask on a Saturday afternoon in the fall." — Will Blythe, New York Times bestselling author of To Hate Like This is to Be Happy Forever
"...a penetrating examination of how and why football has infiltrated our system of higher education..." — Salon
"In Diane Roberts's deft hands, football is never just a game-it's a mirror of American attitudes toward gender, class, and especially race. Roberts is a brilliant cultural critic and a dream of a writer, and Tribal is not only timely-it's necessary reading." — Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove
"People who have decided to read one book having to do with college football should choose Tribal. Roberts presents the attractions of the game as well as the recognition that college football as practiced at Florida State and places like it is indefensible-part 'beloved tradition,' part 'corporate enterprise." — Boston Globe
"Those experiences were no doubt the germ of Tribal which exudes Roberts' satirical Southern sensibility and way of wrapping hard truths in a droll, frequently bawdy and baroque kind of humor that can combine TMZ tabloid shock and Faulknerian literary awe in the same paragraph." — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A gifted writer, [Roberts] is rightly outraged by the sport and her school's links with some of the uglier aspects of American life, but she truly adores the 'Noles. Most readers will share her ambivalence while thoroughly enjoying her take on a troubled sport." — Booklist (starred review)
"[Tribal] affords an explanation of one of the most profound puzzles of today's college-sports scene: why the NCAA colossus has not only secured the American psyche in a stranglehold but continues to tighten its grip." — BookForum
"Diane Roberts is a wonder. She's a surpassingly insightful writer and is as funny as a stand-up comic. Her book Tribal, on college football and far more, is a sui generis masterpiece." — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"Diane Roberts is irresistible, the Molly Ivins of Florida, and Tribal is essential to understanding the dynamics of American culture. Tribal isn't just a good book, it's a great one-and hilarious to boot." — Bob Shacochis, National Book Award-winning author of Easy in the Islands
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September 14, 2015
For someone who claims to love big-time college football as much as Roberts does in this memoir and cultural history, Roberts is certainly critical of the game, going so far as to predict that “the end times are coming for college football.” Roberts is a literature and creative writing professor at Florida State University, the alma mater of elite quarterback and alleged rapist Jameis Winston (the NFL’s 2015 #1 draft pick). She inherited her father’s FSU season tickets and has battled conflicted emotions ever since. With sass, wit, and colorful streaks of cynicism bordering on viciousness, Roberts delivers readers a female fan’s perspective of the game she both compares to slavery and labels “muscular Christianity.” She stretches an essay for the Oxford American into a book-length explanation of a maligned yet revered game, supplementing countless vignettes with references to history, literature, religion, and sex. The author also shares disturbing stories about Robert Champion, a Florida A&M Marching Band drum major who died following a 2011 hazing incident, and Calvin Patterson, the first African-American student to attend FSU on a football scholarship, who killed himself in 1972. While she forces fans to reevaluate their devotion to the game, Roberts concludes she still cares “way too much, even though I know better.” Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman Literary.
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October 15, 2015
Roberts is renowned as a contributor to National Public Radio; she is also a literature professor at Florida State University and a self-loathing Florida State football fan. This book is the equivalent of punk rocker Joan Jett wailing "I Hate Myself for Loving You" without the driving backbeat. Divided into quarters to allow Roberts to examine the game through the usual academic lenses, here the author dissects class, race, and gender--which she refers to as "America's top three psychoses." The book's first part deals with the importance of hatred to football fans and then proceeds onto the intersection of religion and football, gender roles within the sport, and lastly racial divides. While Roberts is clearly well read, the overall tone is smug superiority sprinkled with gratuitous political japes all exhibiting the same bias. VERDICT This volume seems to be aimed at readers who already hate the sport.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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One overeducated Florida State fan confronts the religiously perverted, racially suspect, and sexually fraught nature of the sport she hates to love: college football.
Diane Roberts is a self-described feminist with a PhD from Oxford. She's also a second-generation season ticket holder—and an English professor—at one of the elite college football schools in the country. It's not as if she approves of the violence and hypermasculinity on display; she just can't help herself. So every Saturday from September through December she surrenders to her Inner Barbarian. The same goes for the rest of her "tribe," those thousands of hooting, hollering, beer-swilling Seminoles who, like Roberts, spent the 2013–14 season basking in the loping, history-making Hail Marys of Jameis Winston, the team's Heisman-winning quarterback, when they weren't gawking, dumbstruck, at the headlines in which he was accused of sexual assault.
In Tribal, Roberts explores...
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