DWD's Reviews

Published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR) NOTE: Also published under the title UNBEATABLE! Attucks!  appears to be just a story about a 1950's era basketball team, but it is much more than that. it is the story of Jim Crow style racism in a northern state. It is the story of an underdog school getting its chance to compete at the highest level. It is the story of one amazing player, a great coach, and Indiana's famous single class basketball system. First - the single class basketball system. Back in the 1900's, Indiana had a single class basketball system. This means that every team was in the same playoff system together - no matter how big or how small. This was highlighted in the based-on-a-true-story movie Hoosiers. The true story had Milan High School (161 students) beating Muncie Central (1600+ students) in 1954. Usually, it wasn't that dramatic of a disparity, but small town schools did very well from 1911-1954. The biggest city in the state, Indianap...

  Published in 1996 by Indiana University Press and Indiana Department of Natural Resources. From 1993 to 1995 the two authors combined to take pictures of Indiana from an Indiana Department of Natural Resources helicopter - one was the pilot and one was the photographer. They chose 100 pictures of the state for this coffee table book. There are 92 counties in Indiana, but there is not a picture of each county. However, these pictures are a good representative sample of the state ranging from the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan to the fossil bed at the Falls of the Ohio. The pictures include urban areas, suburbs, small towns, farms and pictures of Indiana's understated beauty. There are no commanding views like the Grand Canyon or the Rockies, but it is beautiful in its own way. Since the book is more than 25 years old, it was interesting to note some of the changes. The Indianapolis skyline has changed with the addition of at least two very large buildings on either side of downtow...

Fascinating Originally published in 2004 by Pavilion Books. 144 pages. Indianapolis Then and Now is part of a series that looks at cities all over the country. While this book would most likely be of limited interest to non-Hoosiers, I found this book to be riveting. I've lived in Indy for almost all of my adult life and I often visited the city as a child. The format of the book is side by side photos of an Indianapolis address in the past (from 60 - 150 years ago) and a current photo of the same building. Sometimes the same buildings and landmarks are still in places, other times there are whole new buildings and landscapes. Part of Indy's canal walk (photo by DWD) Most striking are the changes in the area around Indy's much lauded canal walk, White River State Park and IUPUI. I was also surprised that the Indianapolis Star building is actually quite old - two beautiful buildings with character were merged into one building and then covered with one o...

Indiana Avenue: Black Entertainment Boulevard is an important study into a mostly ignored part of Indianapolis history - the African-American cultural heart of Indianapolis in the first half of the 20th century. It was originally a Master's thesis for a community planning degree, but was re-worked a bit for this self-published effort. There are two kinds of history books. There are the narrative histories, made famous by authors such as David McCollough. A second type of book is the ones that are more research-intensive, mostly facts and they really don't attempt to tell a cohesive narrative. Both are important. The narratives depend on the research books. The research books depend on the narrative books to tell the story to everyone. That simple (and ugly) description is part of a roundabout way of noting that this book is a research book, not a narrative. Bolden does a pretty thorough job of describing the origins of Indiana Avenue and its growth and eventual decline. ...