A retired Chicago Tribune sports writer recalls great moments and great athletes with column reprints and contemporary musings.
Markus’ career spanned three and a half decades, work that included interviewing some of the greatest athletes of the time and witnessing some of the greatest moments in sports. This book is a hand-picked collection of the writer’s best columns, many complete with extended quotes from the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Walter Payton, Wayne Gretzky and others. Interspersed in the nostalgia is the author’s contemporary perspective of not only the events, but also of the events’ coverage, with much of the emotion removed from the original era; regarding the U.S. basketball team’s 1972 Olympic loss to the Soviets, Markus asserts that a lousy tempo, not a lousy call, should have lost the game for the Americans anyway. The collection hints at the author’s and media’s influence on sporting events and people (Markus claims he coined Gretzky’s nickname, “The Great One”); however, those moments pale in comparison to the focus of the collection: enjoyable events and personalities recollected by the nostalgic fan. Markus adds to the fun, recounting various methods of technologies he used to deliver stories to the Tribune (Western Union, fax, dictation and e-mail) and discussing the mock court trial that creatively recounted the controversial Elrod Hendricks-Bernie Carbo home plate call from the 1970 World Series. The book’s tag line of “writing in a golden age of sports” might be debatable as golden ages shift with each passing generation or the aging of the individual observer. The book makes changes in sports writing apparent; Markus says that even simple technologies like the tape recorder changed his writing approach, often for the worse, and his post-retirement column-blogs (included here), complete with the obligatory cute similes, read more like the commentaries of a blow-dried ESPN personality than those of a hardboiled reporter. The blogs also lack hands-on athlete/reporter interviews or actual presence at the game—more relics of a bygone era. Today’s blogger, one that writes from home and often parrots mainline stories, might do well to find instruction, if not inspiration, in this journalism of a bygone era. The glaring shortcoming is the absence of an index or table of contents, as either guide would make quick reference markedly easier. Accompanying dates for the columns would also be useful. A simple, but resourceful trip down memory lane that’s fun and instructional.
Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462869770
Page Count: 585
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading...
A maddening, well-constructed tale of medical discovery and corporate coverup, set in morgues, laboratories, courtrooms, and football fields.
Nigeria-born Bennet Omalu is perhaps an unlikely hero, a medical doctor board-certified in four areas of pathology, “anatomic, clinical, forensic, and neuropathology,” and a well-rounded specialist in death. When his boss, celebrity examiner Cyril Wecht (“in the autopsy business, Wecht was a rock star”), got into trouble for various specimens of publicity-hound overreach, Omalu was there to offer patient, stoical support. The student did not surpass the teacher in flashiness, but Omalu was a rock star all his own in studying the brain to determine a cause of death. Laskas’ (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pittsburgh; Hidden America, 2012, etc.) main topic is the horrific injuries wrought to the brains and bodies of football players on the field. Omalu’s study of the unfortunate brain of Pittsburgh Steeler Mike Webster, who died in 2002 at 50 of a supposed heart attack, brought new attention to the trauma of concussion. Laskas trades in sportwriter-ese, all staccato delivery full of tough guy–isms and sports clichés: “He had played for fifteen seasons, a warrior’s warrior; he played in more games—two hundred twenty—than any other player in Steelers history. Undersized, tough, a big, burly white guy—a Pittsburgh kind of guy—the heart of the best team in history.” A little of that goes a long way, but Laskas, a Pittsburgher who first wrote of Omalu and his studies in a story in GQ, does sturdy work in keeping up with a grim story that the NFL most definitely did not want to see aired—not in Omalu’s professional publications in medical journals, nor, reportedly, on the big screen in the Will Smith vehicle based on this book.
Effectively sobering. Suffice it to say that Pop Warner parents will want to armor their kids from head to toe upon reading it.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8757-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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