The lure of fly-fishing by a delightful essayist who's becoming one of the most popular and respected angling writers in the country. A resident of Longmont, Colorado, Gierach (Even Brook Trout Get the Blues, 1992; Sex, Death and Fly-Fishing, 1990) does most of his fishing in the streams and rivers of the Rocky Mountains. He and a few friends follow one such stream to 11,000 feet above sea level to ``find and fish a certain alpine lake'' reputed to have large cutthroat trout. They wandered, he says, for six or seven miles, not fishing the right lake until after they'd spent the day joyously casting on a scenic pond ``as sterile as a stone toilet bowl.'' On yet another Colorado pond, Gierach tries to ignore a ``purplish-black, almost eggplant-colored'' thundercloud, settling for an afternoon in the truck, watching the bass rise in the rain: ``When you have to hold your hat with one hand and dodge your streamer fly, it's too windy.'' He describes a long-awaited trip to Scotland in quest of Atlantic salmon; fishing a ``private river,'' he and his friends ``drank the good whiskey they don't export to America and, of course, our party of five fished hard for six days and caught one fish among us.'' In 1991 Gierach participated in the First Annual Colorado Fly-Casting Open tournament—his first, and last, try at ``competitive fishing''—during which he placed ``dead third and came very close to wishing ill on a friend,'' but stopped short of hoping for that friend to ``slip on a wet rock and break his casting arm.'' He happily recounts his pursuit of a ``large, fat rainbow'' during a Pale Morning Dun mayfly hatch on a catch- and-release local river. Defiantly floating in a hard-to-cast-to pool about four yards square, the fish eluded Gierach for two days, but the angler remembers it as a time when he summoned all his skill and knowledge and got ``everything right.'' Informative and sassy, these well-crafted gems sparkle even in a genre known for quality writing. (Illustrated by Glenn Wolff—not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-77924-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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