Sports fans and science geeks alike will enjoy these travels in the world where numbers, luck, and superstardom meet.
Wall Street Journal sports reporter Cohen looks into the odd “science of streaks.”
Is there a “hot hand,” the term basketball players use to describe that magical, endorphin-inducing moment when you can’t miss a shot and “achieve some elevated state of ability in which you feel briefly superhuman”? It’s one of the finest of psychological states, and if most of us don’t land in it regularly, there are people like Steph Curry to study, as the author does. By the numbers, Curry shouldn’t be the superstar shooter that he is—even though he’s 6-feet-3 he’s still smaller than most of the players he goes up against, a key datum point. What changed him was a summer spent teaching himself to shoot all over again: lifting the ball over his head and releasing it as he was jumping up, essentially making himself as tall as the defenders who would otherwise block his shots. That summer involved thousands of shots, and in the end, it made Curry “the best shooter the sport of basketball had ever seen.” This case study provides a springboard for Cohen to look at such things as the construction of data sets. One of the cardinal sins involving data is to make conclusions with numbers that are too small to support them—whence the “law of small numbers,” proposed by the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who themselves have written an improbably brilliant hot streak of scholarly papers. Cohen examines the use of those data sets to crunch all sorts of perhaps unlikely problems: Is a supposed lost masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh the real deal? Did Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, really die of a heart attack, as the Soviets proclaimed, or did he die in the gulag? Cohen returns, always, to the game of basketball, but he pauses along the way to provide fascinating looks at coin tosses, investments, farm yields, and other real-world instances of how probability plays out in the world.
Sports fans and science geeks alike will enjoy these travels in the world where numbers, luck, and superstardom meet.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-282072-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Custom House/Morrow
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.
NBA legends Bird and Johnson, fierce rivals during their playing days, team up on a mutual career retrospective.
With megastars LeBron James and Kobe Bryant and international superstars like China’s Yao Ming pushing it to ever-greater heights of popularity today, it’s difficult to imagine the NBA in 1979, when financial problems, drug scandals and racial issues threatened to destroy the fledgling league. Fortunately, that year marked the coming of two young saviors—one a flashy, charismatic African-American and the other a cocky, blond, self-described “hick.” Arriving fresh off a showdown in the NCAA championship game in which Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeated Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores—still the highest-rated college basketball game ever—the duo changed the course of history not just for the league, but the sport itself. While the pair’s on-court accomplishments have been exhaustively chronicled, the narrative hook here is unprecedented insight and commentary from the stars themselves on their unique relationship, a compelling mixture of bitter rivalry and mutual admiration. This snapshot of their respective careers delves with varying degrees of depth into the lives of each man and their on- and off-court achievements, including the historic championship games between Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics, their trailblazing endorsement deals and Johnson’s stunning announcement in 1991 that he had tested positive for HIV. Ironically, this nostalgic chronicle about the two men who, along with Michael Jordan, turned more fans onto NBA basketball than any other players, will likely appeal primarily to a narrow cross-section of readers: Bird/Magic fans and hardcore hoop-heads.
Doesn’t dig as deep as it could, but offers a captivating look at the NBA’s greatest era.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-22547-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
