Blood, Sweat and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada by Colin D. Howell (review)

462 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 his own updated version of physiological selection. If it is accepted as an important contribution to evolutionary theory, then historians may well give Romanes the same kind of attention that has been lavished on other rediscovered scientists, like Gregor Mendel. If, however, the implications of C+G % are discounted as a speculation, Forsdyke himself may share the obscure fate of his historical hero. Whether or not the theory advanced here is adopted by evolutionary biologists, the book shows the potential of modern biochemistry and bioinformatics to revolutionize both our understanding of biological questions and the history of biology. (RICHARD ENGLAND) Colin D. Howell. Blood, Sweat and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada University of Toronto Press. viii, 162. $15.95 It would be a >tall order [to] find an anthropologist or historian unfamiliar with the sporting culture of the twentieth century,= Colin Howell observes. In fact, during the last three decades, social scientists and humanists from every discipline have made the demography, discourse, and practice of sports the subject for exploration and explanation. In Blood, Sweat and Cheers, Howell ably synthesizes much of that literature in the course of his own perceptive, highly readable, often original telling of Canadian sport history. In chapters which focus on the transformation of the loosely organized life-skill competitions of the pre-industrial colonies to the highly regulated sports of urban, capitalist Canada (>Blood=); the reforming social projects of the middle classes (>Respectability=); the commodification of games, equipment, athletes, and information with the rise of consumer society (>Money=); the new identities and markets nurtured by sports spectators (>Cheers=); and the ways in which sports inform the use and display of human bodies (>Bodies=) and the connections people make to the idea of Canada (>Nation=), Howell sketches in the major developments, sports, institutions, and athletes, and reflects upon the scholarship. At times he has little to say about human agency (e.g., >The new forms of sporting activity that emerged in the cities and towns across the country were associated with new systems of thought and production that increasingly brought leisure itself under the influence of the market economy.=) But he argues convincingly that sports have been profoundly shaped by the development of urban capitalism, and that they have contributed in important ways to class and gender relations, and ethnic, regional, and generational loyalties. It=s a masterful survey. Blood, Sweat and Cheers is inclusive history. Howell is particularly attuned to the different backgrounds of the people he writes about, and the often contradictory impacts of sports upon them. He shows how sports enabled male workers to resist the devaluing of their skills in the nineteenth-century humanities 463 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 industrial workplace, by giving new opportunities to demonstrate their abilities and class solidarity, while incorporating them as professional athletes and consumers into marketplace sport. He is sensitive to the many barriers which faced the Aboriginal peoples, women, and immigrants, and their achievements in the face of them. He draws upon his own considerable scholarship on Maritime sports history to show some of the distinct developments and traditions of the regions. Calling this reviewer to task for his Ontario-focused >Canadian= history, Howell makes a telling case for a much more nuanced understanding of pan-Canadian sports culture, arguing >that in many ways sport in hinterland regions, and among marginalized peoples and ethnic minorities, is as important as that of elite groups in the metropolis.= His only blind spot seems to be about masculinities . His chapter on >bodies= focuses almost exclusively on the ways in which sports has shaped female bodies, leaving the much greater influence that sports has waged on males and their bodies unexamined. Blood, Sweat and Cheers does assume a good deal of social theory and Canadian history. I recommend it to my undergraduate students not as a text but as a study guide at the end of the course. But it certainly achieves its purpose >as an introduction to the way in which social historians approach the history of sport.= For both specialist and...