Not Oprah’s Book Club: CHEER!

My girl Kate has a blue streak in her hair. She digs obscure music and was raised by a feminist historian. She’s a vegetarian with a yoga teaching dad. Oh, and she wrote a badass book on the subculture of competitive college cheerleading.
A total contrast, I know, but that’s why her new book, CHEER!, is so cool. Kate is a journalist fascinated in all the ins and outs of how people become obsessed with sports and identified with the cultures surrounding them. When she first did some reporting on college cheerleading for Jane Magazine, where she was working at the time, she didn’t expect to be too drawn in. And then she started to get to know the fearless women and men involved, she started to see that cheerleading was far from rah-rah siskomba and all the other stereotypes. It was leaping thirty feet in the air, concussions, and almost bizarre dedication.
In CHEER! she follows three teams through out the year on their way to Nationals, the Super Bowl of cheerleading. She eats in diners with them, sits in the hospital with them, parties with them, and, of course, watches a lot of frickin’ cheerleading. In the process drugs, race, eating disorders, class, and a host of other issues come up.
Kate creates fascinating, empathy-inducing portraits of this culture and each of its characters. If only we were all so curious about the world and so passionate towards other people. Check out Kate on Good Morning America below:

Next week Oprah and I are taking a little break, but I’ll be back the week after with something thrilling.