Engaging stories from a storyteller who doesn’t just know his subject—he loves it.
The sports journalist and author of sports-related mysteries chats candidly about his first 10 nonfiction books, beginning with A Season on the Brink (1986), and chases down some of their principal characters for a reunion.
The former basketball coach at the University of Indiana, Bob Knight, dominates this book, even as he dominated the first. Feinstein (The Rivalry: Mystery at the Army-Navy Game, 2010, etc.) devotes most of the first 150 pages to Knight, who pops up for return visits throughout, then reappears for a valediction. The author concedes that Knight has some virtues (among them—his former players remain loyal) but believes those virtues are drowned by the torrents of arrogance and entitlement that surge from Knight’s personality. By contrast, Feinstein writes fondly about his experiences covering the ACC, especially the relationships he developed with coaches Mike Krzyzewski, Dean Smith and the late Jim Valvano. He then segues into tennis, writing about such icons as Jimmy Connors (whom no one seemed to like), John McEnroe and—a favorite—Ivan Lendl, who was standoffish until Feinstein encountered some problems with state security in Czechoslovakia. He moves on to baseball and golf, where he writes about interviews with Palmer and Nicklaus, his friendship with David Duval and the massive personal failings of Tiger Woods, who will not find any comfort in these pages. The author bestows his greatest affection on the players he met while writing about the Army-Navy game and on those from the Patriot League basketball teams whose stories he told in The Last Amateurs (2000). At times, Feinstein reveals his own ego issues, often quoting people who praise him.
Engaging stories from a storyteller who doesn’t just know his subject—he loves it.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-07904-4
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.
A disjointed debut memoir about how competitive swimming shaped the personal and artistic sensibilities of a respected illustrator.
Through a series of vignettes, paintings and photographs that often have no sequential relationship to each other, Shapton (The Native Trees of Canada, 2010, etc.) depicts her intense relationship to all aspects of swimming: pools, water, races and even bathing suits. The author trained competitively throughout her adolescence, yet however much she loved racing, “the idea of fastest, of number one, of the Olympics, didn’t motivate me.” In 1988 and again in 1992, she qualified for the Olympic trials but never went further. Soon afterward, Shapton gave up competition, but she never quite ended her relationship to swimming. Almost 20 years later, she writes, “I dream about swimming at least three nights a week.” Her recollections are equally saturated with stories that somehow involve the act of swimming. When she speaks of her family, it is less in terms of who they are as individuals and more in context of how they were involved in her life as a competitive swimmer. When she describes her adult life—which she often reveals in disconnected fragments—it is in ways that sometimes seem totally random. If she remembers the day before her wedding, for example, it is because she couldn't find a bathing suit to wear in her hotel pool. Her watery obsession also defines her view of her chosen profession, art. At one point, Shapton recalls a documentary about Olympian Michael Phelps and draws the parallel that art, like great athleticism, is as “serene in aspect” as it is “incomprehensible.”
While the author may attempt to mirror this ideal, the result is less than satisfying and more than a little irritating.Pub Date: July 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15817-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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