It’s no grind whatsoever to read Svrluga’s flowing prose. An illuminating and entertaining must-read for the baseball...
A season in the trenches—well, on the diamond, anyway—with the Washington Nationals.
“There is no other sport with an everydayness, a drum-drum-drum beat like baseball,” writes Washington Post baseball reporter Svrluga (National Pastime: Sports, Politics, and the Return of Baseball to Washington, D.C., 2006). That’s not the only time in this slender volume where he makes the same observation, but the repetition fits nicely with his theme, borne out by a title that comes from a player’s observation that the work lies in getting up every day of the season and grinding it out: “Head down. Eyes forward. Don’t think about the games that have passed or how many are ahead. Don’t think about the city you’re in or the state of your swing. Keep grindin’.” One of the many virtues of this book—born, as the author recounts, from a pitch to his Post editor to show the everydayness of the game—is its shifting focus from star players like Ryan Zimmerman to baseball wives and their legendary power to all the middlemen and go-betweens involved in the game to the fans who keep coming back game after game to see their heroes. Svrluga laces the narrative with bits of reportage and history, noting that in the early years of the pro game, the schedule was far less demanding, with players usually having more days off back to back than days on—much different from the way things are today. Above all, the author’s peppy narrative is about numbers: the 1,198 games Zimmerman had played at the time of writing, the 9,397 women who showed up at the stadium on Ladies’ Night, the 162 games of the regular season, half at home and half on the road, with “just one equivalent of a weekend, the all-star break.”
It’s no grind whatsoever to read Svrluga’s flowing prose. An illuminating and entertaining must-read for the baseball obsessed.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17628-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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