A pleasing stroll with an agreeable companion whose personality is a step removed from the theatrical Trevino and Rodriguez,...
One of the sport’s quiet men reveals a down-home sense of humor in this amiable take on professional golf at the highest level.
No player on the PGA Tour can be said to come out of the ozone to cop a major championship, but although North has twice won the US Open, something accomplished by very few players, he can hardly be called a household name along the lines of Palmer, Nicklaus, and Hogan. The coverage here of his association with professional golf ranges from a résumé of his career to playing tips to anecdotes about playing with the greats. North stresses the joys of golf and a proper attitude toward the game. “Too often people get so focused on the problems that they’re having that they can’t seem to move through them,” he warns sensibly, though he is also fast with the truisms like “life is a journey,” or “life in general is about ups and downs.” Golfers will appreciate the casual tips on pre-shot routines, speed in putting, and club selection, such as the very intelligent remark that “we’d all be better off if there weren’t numbers on the clubs,” which would lead to individual golfers getting better acquainted with what a club can do for them. These are not five-step instructions, but mental games, and North (with the help of veteran sports coauthor Rocks) keeps the advice straightforward and digestible. On occasion, the voice gets a little homey (“What made the seventeenth hole so difficult was there was a mound of about six feet high in the middle of the green”), and profiles of golfing legends are generally of the “he is a terrific person” variety. North’s detailing of exceptional golf holes, though, is like walking the courses themselves.
A pleasing stroll with an agreeable companion whose personality is a step removed from the theatrical Trevino and Rodriguez, but a fairway wood in front of the corporate techno-golfers.Pub Date: April 12, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28797-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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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