Nate Silver numbers and James Thurber wit turn what should be a harebrained adventure into a pretty damn endearing one.
Two former Harvard Lampoon writers attempt a road trip of epic logistical proportions: 30 baseball games in 30 stadiums in 30 days.
The road-trip memoir has become so tired that there’s almost no premise good enough to resurrect it from endless cliché, and a frenetic race to an arbitrary goal didn’t seem promising. But that wasn’t accounting for two things: Moneyball-worthy mathematical algorithms and the sharp, hilarious prose that has made Lampoon alums famous for generations. Slate writer Blatt is passionate about two things: math and baseball. His travel companion, Brewster, is passionate about neither. But when Blatt wrote a computer program that plotted out the trip—an entire game every day, hitting every stadium, using only a car—Brewster reluctantly agreed to join his friend. The math assured the pair that the trip was possible, albeit illogical (requiring several dizzying loops of the country) and stupid (the average leg between games was a 12-hour drive). But math also didn’t account for things like weather, traffic and human error, turning what should have been a month of leisurely summer fun into a suspenseful series of high-speed hauls through the night. Blatt and Brewster pepper their adventure with statistics—there was, they cheerfully point out in response to parental concerns, only a 0.5 percent chance that they would die in a vehicular accident—and anecdotes. At one point, they even constructed an OK Cupid profile for the romantically challenged Blatt and set him up with a date to a St. Louis Cardinals game. Our intrepid narrators are charmingly self-deprecating and keenly aware of the pointlessness of their journey, and yet they still imbue it with some meaningful thoughts about friendship, community, and the beauty and total absurdity of obsessive fandom.
Nate Silver numbers and James Thurber wit turn what should be a harebrained adventure into a pretty damn endearing one.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2274-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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