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"In Rocket Men, sportswriter John Eisenberg offers the definitive history of Black quarterbacks in the league-men who not only shaped the history of football, but made indelible contributions to the cause of civil rights in America. As Eisenberg recounts, white coaches, scouts, and team owners long perceived Black players as unfit for the quarterback position. Believing Black athletes could not play "in thinking roles," they relegated them to running back, defensive back, and receiver positions. In the late 1960s, a few teams began to bring on Black quarterbacks once more. Players like James "Shack" Harris and Marlin Briscoe proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Black men could play the position just as well--if not better--than their white peers. Yet it wouldn't be until the 1990s, when the league began hiring more Black coaches and general managers, that Black quarterbacks truly got the opportunity to shine. When they did, they transformed the game. Drawing on exclusive interviews with dozens of Black quarterbacks and the players, coaches, and managers who work alongside them, Rocket Men is a reminder of how much Black quarterbacks have had to overcome to gain a space in pro football, and a celebration of the athletes and activists who paved the way for today's Black quarterbacks to triumph"--… (more)
User reviews
The best parts of this book are the chapters on distributions, sampling, and confidence intervals. The visualization of the binomial distribution being squished by DeMoivre into the normal distribution not only provides intuition on the normal approximation, but it leaves a vivid image of the relationship of the distributions. The part on sampling will imprint the 1/sqrt(n) factor in your mind and verse you in sampling issues and strategies. Finally, the analogy of firing an arrow into a target will make you see confidence intervals in an intuitive light.
My only criticisms are that I wish this book had a sequel that dives into the additional topics presented in the conclusion. Resampling, multivariate analysis, and principle components would be good candidates to bring down to Earth. Also, a chapter on Chi square statistics would have been great to round out the development of proportion tests. Anyone interested in learning how statistics is used should read this book. It won't make you an expert or provide you with problem sets, but the concepts will shine through.