What does it all mean? Eisenstock: “Do you think sports talk radio is a fad?” Sports fan and sports-talk junkie: “No,...
It’s clear from Eisenstock’s (Inside the Meat Grinder, 1999, etc.) meetings with sports-talk radio personalities that the fans are the real nutcases, for these gents are uniformly ingenious and interesting, if a little excitable, perhaps a bit shrill and shameless, too.
Radio is a theater of the mind, so you have to work the magic with words, and the men Eisenstock interviews here—Hacksaw Hamilton, John Renshaw, Papa Joe Chevalier, Mike North, and others—have the kind of timing and instincts that comedians and poets die for. Smack, as sports trash talk is called, mostly comes from the caller side of the show; the hosts can be irreverent or convoluted, they can even pull the occasional rage-rant-scream, but the best host is, as one producer noted, “engaging, smart, has a good sense of himself, some knowledge, and can speak off-the-cuff. Frankly, sometimes it helps if they are a little nutty.” The author meets such old pros as Boston’s wonderfully decent Eddie Andelman; Chicago’s Mike North, with his street guy’s twang and perfect comic pitch; New York’s Mad Dog, of Mike and the Mad Dog: “thorough, detailed, and febrile.” When there are two men working together, Eisenstock tries to understand the chemistry; with solo artists, he looks for the defining bit: a Southern comfort voice, an edginess, a class identification (a good many come from hard-enough-knocks backgrounds). He talks with producers, operations managers, and other behind-the-scenes elements, and he provides enough biographical material for readers to be able to put a face to the voice. Spliced into the book are chapters devoted to Arnie Spanier—The Stinkin’ Genius—an up-and-coming showman who sounds “like a bookmaker gargling with glass.” And they are all sports fans, with the fan’s ability to talk sports nonstop, in minute, passionate detail, for a frightening amount of time.
What does it all mean? Eisenstock: “Do you think sports talk radio is a fad?” Sports fan and sports-talk junkie: “No, unfortunately, I think it's here forever.”Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-0694-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
A slim, mildly inspirational book suggesting that you have to risk getting lost in order to find yourself.
A memoir about living in the wilderness, withstanding the elements, seeing no one, and doing almost nothing but running.
Swedish author Torgeby was always an indifferent student beset by anxiety and itching to get outside. “I don’t understand why I should be stuck inside doing something I don’t want to do,” he writes of that boyhood. “I don’t bother with my homework and always have the lowest marks in my class in every test. I just want to run.” His life got worse when his mother was diagnosed with a serious illness and he undertook her care. Though he had begun running competitively early on, he was always better in training than he was in a race, for reasons his coach said were all in his head. When he was 20, he left his home and family to live in the woods and run. Though he would interrupt this seclusion for a six-month training sojourn in Tanzania, he ended up spending four winters battling the elements, running daily, and taking odd jobs in the countryside when his money ran low. A journalist wrote some articles about him, but he wondered why people were interested. Some readers may be tempted to agree with him, as he doesn’t come across as particularly perceptive or reflective. Yet the articles sparked the attention of a documentary filmmaker, toward whom his subject was also ambivalent, not wanting the bother of attention but enjoying a bit of celebrity (the book was a bestseller in Sweden). Other runners found inspiration in his story, and he made his re-entry into civilization, with a wife, a family, and a message about how little you need to live life to the fullest. You don’t need expensive shoes or special socks or any consumer trappings. “You only need to put on your shoes and get going,” he writes. “Let the blood circulate. Then everything becomes much clearer.”
A slim, mildly inspirational book suggesting that you have to risk getting lost in order to find yourself.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4729-5497-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury Sport
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
To be middle-aged and ghosting a scull through the early morning light of a Lake Cayuga dawn: that’s where Strauss finds himself, a pilgrim of sorts, searching for a little self-affirmation. But he’s also a junkie, rapt in the glow that pervades the ancient craft of rowing. The sport appealed immediately to Strauss (History and Classics/Cornell; co-author, with Josiah Ober, of The Anatomy of Error: American Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists, 1990). It wasn—t just that he needed the workout (bookish, he had long preferred the couch to the gym) or that the oars seemed to speak to him of fluid dynamics and Nile oarsmen and red-brick-and-ivy regattas. Rowing also held the promise of testing the athletic competence and resolve of someone who had fumbled painfully as a child. Redemption seemed to lurk in the boat, a wedding of the cerebral and corporeal. Yet this isn—t so much the story of a personal quest. Instead, Strauss revels in the sheer beauty of the sport, from the flow state brought on by the rhythm of perfect oar work to the burnished murk of capacious, ever-so-seedy boathouses. The author’s enthusiasm is infectious, buoying the heft of his writing and allowing for an extended investigation into stroke mechanics, a complex, balletic suite of movements. Strauss also makes something well worth reading from the curious blending of elite and common that permeates rowing: it was a poor man’s gambit in classical Greece, but an aristocratic pursuit in ancient Rome and pharaonic Egypt; it was a favorite sport of the Gilded Age, complete with race fixing and assorted scandals, and yet the sport also found a following in the mining towns of southern Canada. Redemption is a big word. Still, by any measure, Strauss has tapped into something special out there in his scull. He does fine service to his sport in this memoir.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84321-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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