Midnight Basketball, a study of the intersecting areas of race, public policy, and sport, is the type of work that is not only welcomed in, but demanded by, the world today. Media narratives, political rhetoric, and academic attention to sport, social policy, and development are ubiquitous. Sport, though frequently portrayed as apolitical, is mobilized in ways that have significant social and political meanings. Hartmann's Midnight Basketball, an amalgam of years of research, is an important step toward a critically informed, politically situated, and socially insightful understanding of the role that sport plays in society. Hartmann shows that American sport is culturally, politically, and socially significant in its implementation and rationalization. Midnight Basketball begins with a historically-and politically-situated analysis of the midnight basketball phenomenon. Hartmann effectively constructs a narrative from several empirical studies of midnight basketball in the United States that he has conducted over at least two decades. The resulting narrative and analysis have an engaging style and lead to an important set of conclusions about sport and society. Midnight Basketball convincingly demonstrates sport's importance as a cultural force, as well as its ability to provide insight into the broader cultural, social, and political spheres. The analysis offered in Midnight Basketball, positioned solidly in its relevant contexts, builds an evaluation of a specific basketball program in the 'Twin Cities' of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota. This analysis is extended to include the initiative at a policy level. Studying midnight basketball in context provides the basis for insight into the racial and cultural politics that developed in the United States in the Post-Civil Rights era-specifically, the politics of poverty, risk, and race. Hartmann demonstrates midnight basketball's value as an entry point into understanding neoliberal social policy and racialized political discourse, especially in the context of the debates that surrounded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 in the USA. This starkly political analysis of an allegedly apolitical policy tool also suggests that sport has a role to play, not just as a lens for interrogating cultural and political forces, but as a force in and of itself. Sport has its own set of racial and cultural politics that 715299I RS0010.