by Samantha Elphick ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 2007
A strained tale that may only satisfy diehard polo enthusiasts.
Witnessing a suicide prompts three friends to reevaluate their lives in Elphick’s tale of drive and discovery amid the celebrated world of polo.
Jessica Peters, a 48-year-old flamboyant beauty and onetime polo star, has just jumped off the roof of an eight-story chapel in Claremont, Calif. Burton, Mike and Danny are skateboarding in the church parking lot when they hear the ominous thump. Jessica’s suicide provokes 22-year-old Burton to investigate the familiar woman’s background since he, too, had attempted his own hanging after his father suddenly abandoned him and his mother. The angry, short-fused youngster propels himself into Jessica’s world of high-stakes polo and determines to write a book about the starlet’s fame and downfall. But polo thrusts a spell upon him, and he forfeits everything in favor of the sport. Mike and Danny jump on the life-change bandwagon as well, which leads Danny to a career in firefighting and Mike to live his dream of surfing the waves of Australia. While Elphick ekes out a few treats and surprises, the forced prose and implausible relationships—Burton falls in love instantly with an array of girls, including the dead woman—prevent suspension of disbelief. Contrived dialogue, clichés and intrusive italicized side-thoughts further ruin the experience. The things that do work are Elphick’s surprisingly moving denouement, and some anticipative plot threads, such as uncovering the secret Burton’s father, Reid, has been harboring for many years. The heart of the story surrounds Burton, including his tumultuous relationship with Reid, where each is prone to sudden unnatural outbursts in the course of gentle exchanges, and Burton’s disturbing oedipal obsession with his mother. Polo fans might find more favor, as Elphick based the story on Deborah Couples, the real-life polo champ, who succumbed to depression following her public divorce from her golf pro husband, Fred Couples.
A strained tale that may only satisfy diehard polo enthusiasts.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-1425984120
Page Count: 497
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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
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by Jeanne Marie Laskas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 24, 2015
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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